In the discussion at /r/bitcoin, someone claims that each Raspberry Pi manages 16 BitFury ASICs.

Each board has 16 chips, each RPi can hold 16 boards

– http://www.bitfurystrikesback.com/product/bfsb-h-card-v2-2-compatible-with-v3-0-m-board-only/

– http://www.bitfurystrikesback.com/product/bfsb-m-board-v3-pcie-1x-style-connectors/

so a total of 192 Bitfury Chips per Raspberry Pi

This is Daves site but looks like he might be getting out of the Hardware Business

– https://megabigpower.com/shop/

Also the Bitfury rev 2 chips are out and they perform at a higher hash rate and lower power consumption

– http://www.bitfurystrikesback.com/product/bitfury-55nm-rev2-samples/

I will the RPi has better USB support, 3.0 would be a game changer if they could manage to also upgrade from a ARMv6 to something better supported on debian

Hit me up on twitter if you have more questions

Looks that way: I’d love to see more detail about what’s going on there.

That’s about 1/2000th of all Pis ever made. In one place.

Pi are needed to run CgMiner application that controls ASIC boards

One of the clever design decisions was that it is astronomically more profitable to mine bitcoins than it is to try and hack a single bitcoin-account with the same hardware.

The more I learn about bitcoin the more impressed I’ve gotten with it. It really is very, very clever and it does make our current money-system look rather silly.

Well the mathematical model of gold and it’s mining is just the first experiment on the bitcoin-protocol and network. The technology and design ideas behind bitcoin go far far beyond just money, but even just that aspect is plenty powerful.

Imagine being able to bring a somewhat reliable contract/payment system to the entire world (yes not just the affluent West), that does not require “trusted” third parties, is not a prospect to sniff at. For me personally and many in the bitcoin-scene that is one of the primary motivations for being interested in it. If you can point me to a project that has more potential to improve the world than bitcoin I’d be happy to learn about it.

One potential problem is that it’s never possible using exhaustive testing to find the “last” bug in any implementation with more than a few lines of code. The WiFi WEP encryption implementation was based on a sound theoretical footing (at least as far as mathematical proofs can be performed, which is not to perfection), but it contained a fatal bug that rendered every IEEE 802.11b WiFi access point vulnerable to a brute-force attack that would take less than a day to crack, worst-case, using a common laptop of the time. The German Enigma and Japanese Purple codes were theoretically unbreakable, but suffered from operational and implementation flaws that made them sieves without even needing brute-force attacks – Colossus was primarily just a high-speed means of decryption (much faster than the manual methods used by intended recipients), not a means of brute-force attack. The Merkle-Hellman trapdoor-knapsack algorithm seemed perfectly fine for use in a public-key encryption system, but it turned out to have a fatal flaw that wasn’t discovered until after implementations were in use. Debugging software implementations is hard enough, but when the algorithms are encapsulated in hardware such as an FPGA or an ASIC, the challenge of eliminating bugs becomes astronomically more complex. Unwarranted confidence in technology that is impossible to verify end-to-end is a recipe for potential extreme disappointment, and when finances are made dependent on it, well, I think P.T. Barnum had something to say on the subject.

Exactly the point I’ve made many times elsewhere. Read “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” by Nassim Nicholas Taleb to see why the collapse of Mt. Gox is not only predictable, but inevitable, not because of the technology, but the wetware that somehow always winds up abusing it (“It’s different this time.”, “We’re professionals, we know what we’re doing.”, etc.). See also the Hans Christian Andersen tale, “The Emporer’s New Clothes” to see what lemmings will do when it comes to cliffs. Placeholders for value (financial instruments such as money) have no intrinsic value in and of themselves, no matter how rare they are. It’s only confidence (as in “confidence man” or “con man”) in the instruments that conveys any worth to them, and that can be quite fleeting, as booms/busts in Mt. Gox, real estate, financial markets, commodities, currencies, tulip bulbs, probably caveman furs, etc., have so vividly demonstrated over the eons.

Unlike tulip bulbs, Bitcoin is not an asset. Instead, it’s a public ledger transaction platform.

It’s very problematic to look at Bitcoin as an asset or even merely as currency. It’s also currency, but that’s not its only role. It manages transactions. And within those transactions, it can carry information that is verified, timestamped (not unlike a notary), and protected (changes can’t be made to the ledger, and falsified transactions are immediately detected).

Comparing it to the tulip craze is unfair and very inaccurate. (But so is comparing it to gold or any other asset.)