2018-01-16
The lightning network, hopefully ready by Q2 2018, will yield an amazing opportunity for increased revenue for retained BTC. On top of being able to funnel earned BTC toward projects we want to support or invest in, we will have additional incentive for maintaining BTC through dips in price. Our altcoin/BTC strategy is coming together: better CPUs with remote managed virtual machines able to run full nodes. Extra threads may be set to mine Monero in the interim. ETH, though, poses a significant timing/entry risk. We are currently selling mining contracts for ETH to sustain investment and pay down debt. If we choose to accumulate BTC for staking in the lightning network in Q2, we will have to continue to sell ETH on and off exchange. Casper, part of the upcoming ETH hardfork, will reduce mining profitability of ETH. Selling ETH will lower the likelihood of our being able to stake in Casper. For now, increasing capacity and holding as many coins as possible seems to be the best way forward. We're watching GitHub and Crypto news for a more accurate timeline, but there is more volatility ahead to be sure.
2018-01-08
We continue assess options for equipment utilization should blockchain technology trend toward hashgraph or Proof of Stake algorithms. Right now, we are ahead of most small mining operations thanks to our focus on high-resale components. All of our rigs have performance at there core, if not the cores to utilize it. Over the next two months as benched cards on Red Forest get rolled out into production mining rigs, we will reconstruct an all NVidia test bench under the AM4 platform to document bottlenecks. It is important that we understand what system limitations might upset customers to guide us toward platform construction in Q2 2018. The new Ryzen chips and release of Intel's 8th Gen processors hold promise for handling significant GPU accelerated compute; however, memory capacity and bandwidth may be a problem. Also, 5 out of six GPUs at a minimum connected through PCIe 1x, bandwidth from CPU to GPU may cause significant slowdown. Frankly, we may have to look toward low end EPYC or Threadripper platforms for full x16 connectivity to more devices.
2018-01-05
Part of Ikimono-US' mission is to level the playing field in access to production and monitoring technology. As AI's can glean more from unstructured datasets, those with the resources to subscribe to cloud-based analytics or capable of training AIs to monitor their family and home on local servers will leave the median population further behind. The wealth gap is also a technology gap. The promise of access, the ability to produce content or analyze data, is contingent on access to powerful compute systems. While many think mining is a waste run huge heating elements for hot water and warm air. At iKimono-US, we see embedded infrastructure that couples monitoring, analysis, and prescriptive analytics in a localized, personal, secure, manner. But, there's no way to afford giving each home a Tesla or Volta GPU. That is, unless it, like solar panels, can pay itself off.
Proof of Work or pay-per-service/share distributed computing would allow system integrators to loan equipment on a massive scale with the family reaping the benefits of high-end computing resources at a fraction of the cost. Depending on the loan and lifetime of equipment, maybe even making money back as networks like Golem come online. There is massive opportunity should the community of researchers around blockchain, biotechnology, and AI, find a way to direct some of the revenue spent renting centralized, long-queue, supercomputers towards distributed PPS or PoUW (Proof of Useful Work) systems.
2018-01-02
The casper proof of stake fork in Ethereum may impair profitablity outside of ASIC solutions for bitcoin. Not wanting to purchase single purpose machines with little salvage value or opportunity for rebuild into functioning systems for resale, iKimono-US needs to begin planning acquisitions to reflect future demand for distributed computing. Startup Golem has shown proof of concept for high-end distributed rendering which could prove a boon for owners of GPU-based mining rigs. Search and sort algorithms that lend themselves to CPU processing might be hard to distribute without a good distributed storage or random access protocol. Groups are working on this and it may prove useful to invest in redundant storage for distributed pay for storage systems. This would be great as we already run FreeNAS systems and have machines with room for an HBA to manage more drives. It seems algorithms that require transforming large, predictable, chunks like those seen in molecular biology/biochemistry, signal analysis (think SETI), or rendering large datasets maybe training AI's, will have revenue potential. Without benefit of speculative pricing, though, recovering cost of assets may be difficult. With any luck, we have a year before proof of work is replaced in practice. With four to six month recover times on equipment, investment in GPU mining rigs will continue through April 2018 at least. We'll keep an eye out.
2017-12-21
Ethereum is more valuable than the currency transactions it maintains. It's potential for holding identities safe behind a public or private key and the ability to create autonomous programs may change the way insurance tracks its people. Right now, there is no good way to consolidate medical records into a searchable form that may be compared to frontier biochemical research. If certain changes in metabolism fall outside normal developmental pathways, individuals would have to wait months for a hospital to import laboratory reports and findings that often need be hand delivered. We can do better. Though initiatives like Microsoft's Health Vault are a nice attempt, they are little better than a document vault for scans of health documents. What we need is a streamlined way to deliver health and activity over a lifetime that can be anonymously compared against models that incorporate region and genetics.