DIY FPGA Bitcoin Miner

A brief explanation of how bitcoin and mining works, followed by a high-level overview of the FPGA bitcoin miner I developed.
Repository: github.com/rkh...

[@JeanCast]

I would like to see more of this, demonstrating the entire process from start to finish of setting up the miner.

[@richardharris1224]

I appreciate the interest! I'll consider a follow on video, but for now I provided my code and leave that as an exercise for the viewer

[@mukilaneee]

@@richardharris1224 please make a video

[@TheMiningMersie]

@@richardharris1224 great video! I would also love to see the entire process if how to set up miners for fpgas, would it be possible to do it to any minable coins like eth?

[@anythingbutASIC]

@@TheMiningMersie yes. look up the Forest kitten by SQRL

[@alizee3687]

Have you managed to find a video that explains the whole process from start to finish and mining if you have please forward me the link much appreciated

[@frankdoherty8999]

Infrastructure is broadly a hardware concern as blockchain is composed of both hardware infrastructure and software transactions. This is a fascinating video gripping software entering the Infrastructure age. Thanks Richard!

[@EC-VyshnavMR]

Great Video Covering the Thought Process of Designing a FPGA! I aspire to design myself One!

[@shareyourchristmas]

Hi Thank you for sharing your implementation. I would like to see an ethereum miner FPGA, I would like to try making it, following your example.

[@MrAliCAN6566]

Thank you richard for a clear explanation, now I understand better after this video.

[@esra_erimez]

This is an exciting project. I hope you keep it up.

[@skylah8752]

Thanks Richard. Great video. Have you ever thought about scaling this? Like designing a board with banks of the FPGA chip used on the PYNQ?

[@alizee3687]

Great job mate. Is there follow up video Would like to know more about this DIY miner What are the hash rate and profitability Which pool supports this miner What are power consumption and noise etc I'm a new subscriber and would like to see more videos like this Thanks

[@dayadam16]

This video is amazing and if the prices are as cheap as they look why the hell would people keep running to gpus?. Whats the power consumption like and how easy is to run like 10 of these lol. What os are you running for it? Do they have onboard video?

[@richardharris1224]

This project was mainly for educational purposes rather than to make a profit. In fact, this setup will not make any profit mining Bitcoin. If it was profitable I probably wouldn't give it out for free! Right now people use ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits) to mine Bitcoin, and they are orders of magnitude more powerful than FPGAs or GPUs for the SHA256 proof of work algorithm. However, it is possible that this hardware platform and my code can be adapted for other coins that don't have competition from ASICs. I've been looking into that, and I'd be open to suggestions about coins that might be suitable. I haven't measured the power consumption yet, but there might be a spec in the data sheet. The OS is a flavor of Linux specific to the PYNQ board, and they have a built in HDMI port.

[@anythingbutASIC]

The only way a FPGA would be profitable is if the bitsream creators made and distributed it for a coin or token before asic manufaturers produced a ASIC rig. Example being how Kadena was mined with FPGAs from hashaltcoin at the beginning then ASIC miners came in last year and now is the most porfitable coin to mine. If anyone was going to make a profit with FPGAs in current year they would have to use no less than a Intel Altera Stratix10 or Xilinx Ultrascale+/Versal. But those Slabs of logic cost anywhere from $3000 to $20000 for one and you can only hope and ASIC manufature does not come along and stick it to you. Getting into FPGA mining is like being a pioneer of the crypto community you etheir have to know someone or know how to build the equiptment yourself because you will be on the cutting edge if you make a device that is profitable.

[@esra_erimez]

Is there a follow up to this video?

[@developeralgo305]

Power consumption is 6.6W off-the-wall for 39.99 MH/s impressive

[@stage666]

profit $0.000014 per day

[@eduardomendez9878]

What about to reprogram and use fpga (Control Unit) of Siemens Hardware? PLC like simotion

[@ET-sv1rf]

Did u use VHDL language? Are that working just fine? Thank u for the content

[@carljung6467]

Awesome thanks

[@snapo1750]

Could you show us how to calculate sha256 with only AND, OR, NOT gates?

[@thevoidwalkertvw]

How much time did it take to break even the initial cost of the FPGA? Is it a good idea to mine using an FPGA? (I am a hardware engineer too) by mining i mean any coin, not just bitcoin.

[@davemorphling7432]

"hopefully it was least mildly interesting" ??? DO MORE VIDEOS MAN!!!!!

[@MikeKramerMusic]

Hi Richard, Is it possible to chain multiple boards together to increase the hashrate?

[@richardharris1224]

In theory I suppose it's possible. But if you just ran multiple boards independently the effective hashrate would be the sum of the hashrates of each board, so I don't think you would need to

[@DooryardEd]

So what chip would give full speed or would you just double up?

[@MC...]

I really like this project, and want to try something similar. Since the vid, have you thought about other algoritms like ETC, ERG, FLUX? If your board does 40 MH/s on BTC SHA256, I think that would bee sufficient for algos like ETC, RVN, and more. Looking fwd to more vids! Thank you!

[@mukilaneee]

Possible to increase the hash rate from 40 MH/S to 120 MH /s?

[@richardharris1224]

With this board I don't think so

[@thanatosor]

@@richardharris1224But even with U55c it's only 60-90MH/s

[@Ravenofnorth]

im trying to make my own from scratch , could you please help me in making it , i have been mining on gpu , and cannot afford the ASIC miners , this is the best alternate for me. i have never used an fpga before , and if i were to purchase one , i need to know how the software can be used , and from where i can get it

[@waldemarleise7201]

Hi Richard. Great video and a very cool project. I want to try your design on another board and I was wondering in which byte order your sha256d_wrapper expects the mining data...Liitle endian or big? From what i could figure out by looking through your code it seems: MID_STATE = "big" RESIDUAL_DATA ="little" TARGET = "big" Am I right? Thanks for your work and the excellent explanation.

[@waldemarleise7201]

Could finally verify your design by using sha256d_fpga_sim.py to construct the necessary data. Thx a lot. The Xilinx Spartan-7 chip i am using only supports 12,5 MH/s.

[@richardharris1224]

@@waldemarleise7201 Glad you figured it out! The byte ordering was quite confusing to me as well haha

[@landshut181]

Would it work for CKB mining?

[@mukilaneee]

Are any other algorithms Suitable for FPGA?

[@richardharris1224]

In theory you can do basically any algorithm with an FPGA, but it's most suitable for algorithms that can be optimized by doing lots of operations in parallel. As far as other crypto PoW algorithms, Litecoin's scrypt seems suitable, although ASICs already exist for it as well. There are probably others too, but I haven't looked into it much yet.

[@anythingbutASIC]

Blake2s, Odocrypt, SHA3, Basically what hashaltcoin is already mining.

[@qwickygamingfun171]

This kind of board is totaly not usefull for bitcoin at 39/ mh a single asic s9 its 14th. But maybe this board can mine coin like monero?

[@richardharris1224]

Maybe it could, but I'm doubtful it would be as fast as a CPU on the randomx algorithm

[@TheSephrn]

@Richard Harris are you using an SDK build with this?

[@richardharris1224]

No SDK needed

[@TheSephrn]

@@richardharris1224 how are you talking to the FPGA? UART? Maybe this is something special to do with PYNQ device and Python?

[@richardharris1224]

​@@TheSephrn The FPGA is a memory mapped slave to the processor. Yeah, the PYNQ has built-in libraries to use this bus from Python

[@westleytusa6592]

Have you tried Eth mining with the U200 cards?

[@richardharris1224]

I haven't

[@terryterry1655]

mining rate ? comparable with Antminer s19 xp at 140Th/s

[@richardharris1224]

40 Mh/s. Waaaayyyy slower

[@princeedward21]

couldn't hear you

[@maxedmoto]

make video making one💯👌

[@LarryTheRoleplayerTM]

why

[@stop-terrorists]

Check your github messages. A friend of mine thinks he knows something that rest of us don't. If you think you're up to the task, contact him.

[@boriscrisp518]

TURN THE MUSIC DOWN

[@developeralgo305]

i don't think it mines any bitcoin at all. i did have a test connected to binance bitcoin pool for 24 hours and i even don't see the workers/miners , even though they are connected and mining. No workers appear connected on the binance dashboard . I have done same tests on a few bitcoin pools. I think its just simulation miner not actual mining to a pool. Please elaborate if it does. i am waiting

[@richardharris1224]

I tested it on slushpool and the worker appeared connected on the dashboard. But the hashrate was below their threshold of 500 Mhash/s so it didn't display it's hashrate

[@glenluyckx12]

We need more BS devs.. You got any free time?

[@demetrialekos2646]

i NEED A CUSTOM mINER BUILT FOR 1700TH/S TO MINE kaspa COINS TO HOOK TO MY COMPUTER, HOW MUCH WOULD IT COST TO GET SOMEONE TO MAKE THE MINER

[@djs.3955]

Hi Richard, wanted to discuss some of the finer details of your work. May I contact you directly?

[@richardharris1224]

You can open a new issue on the Github repo