Butterfly Labs Wont Mine PPC :(

Economics Mining (Proof of Work)
1

Well, I am still waiting for a commercial company that will hire out mining by the GH/s. For me it would make sense as I do not have the funding to buy such equipment yet I earn enough to pay a small fee per month.

This is the e-mail I got from them confirming they would not mine PPC:

Hi Chris,

Thank you for your interest in our service “Mining By the GH”. Sorry for the great delay in a response to your email.

Although our equipment is capable of mining other cryptocurrencies using the SHA-256 algorithm, our mining by the GH/s service will only mine for bitcoins.

Warm Regards,
Abbey
BF Labs, Inc.

On Sat, Dec 7, 2013 at 12:08 AM, Chris W. Walsh *********@gmail.com wrote:

Greetings,

I noticed your 'Bitcoin Mining by the GH' service and I wondered if this also applied to Peercoin? It's based on the same technology (SHA-256) so I thought I would ask if you could tailor my mining machine to mine Peercoin? If not then no problem, no harm done in asking.

I look forward to hearing from you.
Regards,
Chris</blockquote>

If anyone heard of any legitimate companies that offer this service, please do let me know :).

2

That’s short-sighted on their part. A paying customer is a paying customer, regardless of where the hash is pointed. I’ll send a note over to them tomorrow to see if we can start to exhurt a little more pressure to help them see the error in their ways.

3

Thanks Ben, and I thought the same. I’m willing to pay them :).

4

Total speculation on my part, but I have a feeling that they won’t do it because they are piggybacking on every machine they have running in their data center. Otherwise, if you bought a “Monarch equivalent” of hashing power, there would be no issue if you leased the whole unit.

5

Peercoin has the potential to overtake Bitcoin (which will happen eventually) but they are trying to postpone that as long as possible. If some company started mega-mining Peercoin, it would cause the price to explode. Commercially mega-mining Peercoin would cause the block reward to plummet, and make Peercoin extremely rare, and they would run themselves out of business…Peeroin is designed to be energy efficient and eventually make miners obsolete. …Choosing to mine Peercoin instead of Bitcoin is good for the environment, but they care more about profits than they do about saving energy. The only way you will make them switch to mining Peercoin is if people decide to invest in Peercoin pushing the price higher, and making mining Peercoin more profitable than mining Bitcoin.

If you care about the environment, don’t invest in anymore mining equipment, just buy Peercoin’s directly. This will bolster the price which will, in turn, cause Bitcoin miners to switch to mining Peercoin, and this will help make Peercoin more rare and more valuable. If all of the mining power that is focused on Bitcoin switches to mining Peercoin, Peercoin’s block reward would be reduced to about 28 coins…which would be about 900 new coins per day.

http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/coins/peercoin

6

I don’t think it is short sighed. Supporting competing currencies don’t really help the value of Bitcoin and making services/products only available for purchase for Bitcoin does.

7

Well i’d be happy to see us supporting some other firm other than ButterFly Labs. They are a terrible company, very poor on delivery dates, customer service and spend a fortune on advertising so many know of them but EVERY thead i see actually asking about them is filled with VERY unhappy customers… myself included.

I would like to see us start up connections with http://www.coinfirma.com/

10 Glenlake Parkway
Suite 130
Atlanta, GA 30328

(404) 594-COIN
9:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M. EST

Only issue is/… The following contracts are currently available for Pre-Order

@JBT u wanna get a swarm and action plan going on this?

Fuzzybear

8

If this company allowed Peercoin mining as well as Bitcoin, I’d throw some business their way.

9

While agree with others that it would be nice to see support from other companies other than BFL, what that rep was telling you was not correct. Not at all. I know for a fact that you can mine TerraCoin with their units. I ran across a thread the other day in their forums where some owners had claimed they could use the BFL devices to mine PPC. Here’s the link (I think): https://forums.butterflylabs.com/jalapeno-single-sc-support/4882-mining-ppc-possible.html

That’s not the one I was thinking of… Maybe this is better: https://forums.butterflylabs.com/jalapeno-single-sc-support/3678-mining-altcoins-bfl-miners.html

Be sure to look a ways down in the thread. None get into the nuts and bolts, but it seems like it should be fairly straight-forward.

Just to let you know, and because I know a number of people who work for BFL (I live nearby, and that’s about all I’ll say about it), but they do not want YOU to know that you can mine SHA-256 coins with their devices. Seriously, unless you speak to the right person (literally, one person), they will ALWAYS tell you that their devices only mine BTC. It simply isn’t true. I’ve known for several months that people mine TerraCoin with BFL ASICs, and also know that there are few people the technical side who mine PPC within the halls of BFL. No joke.

I’ve only tinkered with it a bit, since I’m not the savviest person when it comes to tech, and I think I made a few errors in my first attempts. I’ve been researching using BFL and KnC miners to this same end because once BTC mining diff reaches the point where my setip is not profitable, I’m moving completely to PPC, since I prefer it to other SHA-256 coins… apart from BTC. BTC is my preference simply due to the market. Aside from that, it’s all the same to me. I’m not an evangelist for alt coin. I just want to maximize the profitability lifespan of my hardware, and don’t really want to sell it if I can mine another coin successfully. I’m going to hook up a Jalapeno later this evening and try once more. IfI remember to do so, I’ll post my results here for others.

Before I end this painfully long thread: BFL will not admit that their miners will work with other SHA-256 coins. Most of their customer support staff don’t even know what SHA-256 means, nor that there are other SHA-256 coins to be mined. Aside from about 3-5 people within the company, the rest have no clue. This is 99.9% true of their customer service. Take anything they tell you with a grain of salt, as they are not a very knowledgeable bunch, considering they work for a tech company. :wink: Gook luck to all of you!

10

I believe you missed a subtle point in the first post, this criticism was referring to the BFL hosted service, not their standard hardware.

If you order a unit from them, you can use it to mine any SHA-256-based crypto you want. But if you order their “by the GH/s” hosted service, they won’t point it at a Peercoin pool for you, just a Bitcoin one.

11

yes, i indeed missed the point. My apologies. Wit that said, some of what I said regarding the mindset of BFL should then serve to underscore the fact that they not only will not allow it in the short term, but no matter how many people ask for it, they never will. Wit the MbtGH, you’ll never have any more control other than choosing a BTC pool via the Web UI. As mentioned, they do not even want customers knowing that it is possible to mine anything other than BTC with any of their units. Of course, anyone with half a brain knows that will a little effort, you can mine any SHA-256 coin with their ASICs. Although they claim they won’t allow it via their hosted hardware, perhaps if you can simply add the pool, worker, and PPC wallet key, you might get away with it. I can tell you that even at this late stage, they do not have a finalized Web UI prepared (hell, as of today their first chips are still just beginning testing). If they do not run the crap on EasyMiner, and there’s a decent chance it will BFGminer, or at least the ability to choose might be there, just because one of the reps says it can’t be done, or it’s not supported, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. The rep from the OP’s copied email, ‘Abby,’ knows little about any of the tech. She either said ‘no’ because they are all told to say ‘no’ unless it is related to BTC, or she asked someone else, and they told her ‘no’ even though they really have no clue. It might be more difficult (and, yes, I concede, perhaps indeed impossible) to configure settings to mine PPC on their hosted hardware, I wouldn’t let an answer from customer service discourage you from trying. I would pretty much only trust answers from their tech support, since I know a few of them use BFL gear to mine PPC on-site, and if you want a definitive answer, you’d want to get an answer from a guy named Jonathon, but he’s hard to access. Once this goes live (and who knows when that might be), the other tech support staff, Nate and Ceasar, would be the ones to ask. I wouldn’t ask them ‘how’ to do it, but if it is theoretically possible. Asking any of them at the moment means nothing since they are not yet close to going live with the MbtGH product. You can simply follow BFL_Josh’s threads to work that out. But in all seriousness, you average BFL customer service rep cannot do much more than connect their own devices, few know much about BTC even, and I’d be surprised if any of the customer service reps know what PPC actually is. They may know of LTC because it is the second most popular currency. I wouldn’t take their word for it. If they are not forcing EasyMiner down your throat, I’d set a BTC pool as a failover, and then see what happens when you try to mine PPC. Worst case scenario is a little downtime. That’s my two cents, anyhow. I don’t say all this because I know PPC like a master… I’m not just new to the boards - I’m also trying to figure out how to use my ASICs to mine PPC. I do know BFL very, very well, however, and I’ll just leave it at that.

Again, sorry I misread the initial post, but I do hope my point regarding how knowledgeable your average BFL customer service rep is will be take seriously.

12

[quote=“FuzzyBear, post:7, topic:1793”]Well i’d be happy to see us supporting some other firm other than ButterFly Labs. They are a terrible company, very poor on delivery dates, customer service and spend a fortune on advertising so many know of them but EVERY thead i see actually asking about them is filled with VERY unhappy customers… myself included.

I would like to see us start up connections with http://www.coinfirma.com/

10 Glenlake Parkway
Suite 130
Atlanta, GA 30328

(404) 594-COIN
9:00 A.M. - 5:00 P.M. EST

Only issue is/… The following contracts are currently available for Pre-Order

@JBT u wanna get a swarm and action plan going on this?

Fuzzybear[/quote]

While I agree that supporting companies apart from BFL is a great idea, they hosted 100 GH/s is significantly higher than the $10.83/GH/s (1 year contract) that BFL offers. Though their page says ‘Mining Now,’ when you go to checkout it still says ‘pre-order’ (just as Fuzzybear points out in his post - sorry, I just assume you’re a guy, so if I assign the incorrect pronoun, tell me so). Their price is also only for 1-year hosting. I’m sure their customers will have their hashing power online before BFL does the same. No doubt in my mind, in fact, but Their price isn’t what I’d call competitive for 28 nm. Figure that the mining contract costs ~$1000/yr (that’s roughly the special price BFL has worked out), you’re left with ~$2000 for 28 nm equipment you can use for a year. I purchased a KnC Mercury @ 100 GH/s (does ~145 GH/s, actually) for ~$2050 incl. shipping in August of last year, and received it in October. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve heard good things about Coinfirma, and while I’m not sure whose chips their using, or if they developed them in-house, I simply think their offer is overpriced when compared to other companies with regard to price per GH/s. For this to be a truly lucrative offer, at least in my eyes, they’d need to knock off $1300-$1500 of their price. That would put them ahead of BFL, and they’d have no other real competition in the realm of cloud mining. With BFL, the only 28 nm offering that they haven’t backed off of in terms of pricing has been their Mining by the GH. I understand charging more for customers buying 1-50 GH/s, but they don’t even give a price break @ 100-??? GH/s. While Coinfirma might have BFL beat in almost every aspect, they are well behind them in price-point. That is not an issue for some, but it certainly is for others.

When I recently had to send my KnC unit in for an RMA (7-day turn-around from Midwest USA to Sweden and back!), I mentioned to Keith Cole that they should come down off the Neptume cloud and present come products that the average miner could afford; or, they should even consider a kind of Mining by the GH program like that BFL has. Not the same, but hosting for hashing power even as low as what Coinfirma offers. He wouldn’t say much, but mentioned that these were things that KnC had been considering, too. These guys are not stupid, and know their users are mining other SHA-256 coins with their gear. They knew this before they even shipped their first units to the public, which is why they had put up videos of the FPGA Mars prototype long ago, which would allow users to reprogram and switch between scrypt and SHA-256 coins at will. That project hasn’t been spoken of in months, but it showed that they saw the potential for mining crypto in general. Much more foresight than BFL has had. They took in all of those trade-in FPGAs and did what with them? Nothing, that’s what. At that time, they could have flooded the LTC market, or any number of other markets; but, they were too busy mucking up an already flawed business plan and in reactionary mode due to design flaws in the 65 nm products. I’d really like to see KnC take advantage of a vacuum forming in the mid-price range, or really any company for that matter. I’ve been testing both my BFL and KnC geat since some kind folks here helped me figure out how to mine PPCoin (great community here, btw, and I’m not just kissing ass because I’m sort of critiquing Fuzzybear’s suggestion regarding Coinfirma - I’ve received a lot of kind help and think there is a much more productive level of discourse here than the BTC counterpart), and all of my gear works pretty well, though my HW errors rise a bit on the KnC, but that might be easily adjusted through tweaking voltage settings.

In summation, I am in strong agreement with Fuzzybear that miners need to begin to gravitate to other companies who provide better support, stand firm to their delivery dates, provide adequate communication when they do see foresee a problem - instead of mentioning it months after the fact, and who don’t have the kind of PR frontman that BFL has…not mentioning names. :wink: I think as it becomes more and more known that people are not going to use a 100 GH/s device for BTC because it’s a waste, we might begin to see these products advertised as simply miners for SHA-256 coin, and BTC fanboys will just have to get used to the competition. In some of the exchanges I use, other alt coins are put down, as if this early in the race it’s a given that BTC will replace current forms of currency. Nonsense. The technology is worth way more than the coins, and the coins would be worthless tomorrow, while the companies making the hardware walk out with sacks of fiat. What turned me on to PPCoin is that when BTC was super volatile, I could always store my fiat in PPC, and know when I later sold it, I’d either only take a small hit, or, and this was most of the time, I’d get $20-$30. Now, I’ve decided that I need to diversify, and PPCoin was the logical choice. I hope it continues to grow, and I sincerely hope that we’ll see more companies spring up to facilitate growth in these niche markets where people are necessarily throwing $10,000 at equipment. I also hope that Coinfirma relaxes its prices to be a little more competitive, even if they are making hash available within 24-48 hrs of placing an order. It’s simply overpriced, IMO. Another product I’ve found recently and liked, but involves a little more DIY than I’m personally comfortable with…but I bet many of you would find it a piece of cake is HashBuster Alpha: http://eligius.st/~gateway/products/hashbuster-alpha - it is currently out of stock, and goes fast when in stock. It was in-stock just a week ago or so when I first marked the page. The price is fair, and my dealings with the guys from Eligius have always been fine. just something to consider.

I’m going to start another thread where I mess with BFL customer service to see if they even really know if one can mine PPCoin with the Mining by the GH. I was under the impression that users could select their own pool. If that’s the case, you should be able to mine PPCoin. I have a feeling they don’t even know how to answer the question. Ultimately, I could make a phone call and find out, but messing with their customer service will be more fun. Stay tuned!

13

[quote=“Chris180Z, post:1, topic:1793”]Well, I am still waiting for a commercial company that will hire out mining by the GH/s. For me it would make sense as I do not have the funding to buy such equipment yet I earn enough to pay a small fee per month.

If anyone heard of any legitimate companies that offer this service, please do let me know :).[/quote]

Isn 't it the case that they provide you with an online dashboard for those contracts, and you can set this up with any pool details you want? If so, it doesn’t matter what they say, just point the hashpower to a PPC pool ;).
I would write them and ask how the contract works technically. If the answer is that you can give your (stratum) pool details in the dashboard, then it will be fine (at least when you are comfortable with this preorder thingy… personally I’ll stay away from this stuff).

14

[quote=“plasmapelz, post:13, topic:1793”][quote=“Chris180Z, post:1, topic:1793”]Well, I am still waiting for a commercial company that will hire out mining by the GH/s. For me it would make sense as I do not have the funding to buy such equipment yet I earn enough to pay a small fee per month.

If anyone heard of any legitimate companies that offer this service, please do let me know :).[/quote]

Isn 't it the case that they provide you with an online dashboard for those contracts, and you can set this up with any pool details you want? If so, it doesn’t matter what they say, just point the hashpower to a PPC pool ;).
I would write them and ask how the contract works technically. If the answer is that you can give your (stratum) pool details in the dashboard, then it will be fine (at least when you are comfortable with this preorder thingy… personally I’ll stay away from this stuff).[/quote]

If they’re using ASICs, there’s a pretty good chance that Stratum won’t be an issue. All the major BTC pools at this point are stratum. As for the Web UI, the last time I spoke with a rep from BFL, their CSR had no idea what the interface was going to look like, but were telling people that you’d be able to select your own pools. I agree with you that in this case, you’d simply enter an address to mine PPCoin. I imagine them to look like a stripped down version of the KnC Web UI, and you just enter the info into the necessary fields. I’ve done a little mining with my KnC, but was on a smaller pool, so it was requesting work after every few lines. I think when you contact these places, you shouldn’t ask them if their equipment will mine PPCoin, of it they allow it, but ask them if you can select your own pools, how easy is it to add pools through their Web UI, can you add failover pools, etc. Keep PPCoin out of the dialog. These companies are on the BTC bandwagon, and it’s likely the person you’d be dealing with would know that PPCoin is also SHA-256. Many of then likely don’t know what SHA-256 even means and that it is what enables the mining of BTC. I’ve gathered that much from dealing with BFL, at any rate. - I also +1 what plasmapelz said regarding preorders. Be very cautious. Just as an example, BFL started taking preorders for the Monarch in mid/late-August. They said on their website (might still be there) that a ‘bullet run’ would ship at the end of December. Never happened. They said shipping would begin shipping earnest sometime in January. Never happened. The latest news posted on their website by BFL_Josh stated that their first 10 28 nm chips were still waiting to be tested out in California. That was a week ago, or so. It takes 1-2 weeks to test a chip. After that, they have to make them in quantity (that happens in several places and will take a few weeks at least before they start putting them on their PCB). Then you have to hope that their supply chain for other components has been reliable and that they had the good sense to order what they need in advance. They may send out a few units before the end of the month to make it look like there has been progress, like they did with the Jalapenos in the 65 nm product line. If you ordered a Monarch in August 2013, I’m betting that you wouldn’t receive it until March 2014 at the earliest. If you bought the Mining by the GH when it became available a little later, I’m betting that it will be April before the first customers see anything. If you order now, it won’t take as long, but I’d bet it would be 3 months at least AFTER the first customers start receiving their products. I don’t even need to mention the 65 nm fiasco. You’ll pay more per GH if you buy from a seller on Amazon or some trusted source, but you’d likely be better off. Plus, what if one of these companies folds before you get your equipment. Probably won’t happen, but could.