Yesterday’s community call was focused on getting feedback from crypto miners, specifically on how they might integrate Livepeer transcoding into their operations. Several miners and infrastructure providers participated in the call, including representatives from Blockdaemon.
Some key insights:
- Transcoding for Livepeer might require more bandwidth than just crypto mining.
- For ease of use, we might want to take an opensource miner and add Livepeer transcoding functionality.
- A system must be engineered to facilitate the sharing of the GPU resources between Livepeer transcoding and crypto mining.
- Riser GPU adapters used by miners are a potential source of a bottlekneck
- There was a discussion on whether or not people would prefer to transcode side-by-side with mining, or if they would run dedicated hardware:
- Some infrastructure providers in the call said that they are getting specialized hardware to use only with Livepeer.
- Other miners said that they are always interested in tinkering with their rigs, looking for new ways to improve performance, and side-by-side appeals to them as something to try out.
- There was a discussion on how a roll-out of a reference-implementation would go
- Doug asked the community if they would prefer an open-sourced dual-mining reference implementation, or a closed-source and proprietary one so as to offer a competitive advantage.
- One miner said that the community is generally skeptical of closed-source products
- An infrastructure provider said that they are okay with using closed-source tools if they come from a trustworthy provider.
- Some miners like EthOS, HiveOS, and SMOS because of their point-and-click simplicity. One miner suggested that Livepeer put out their reference-implementation as an OS for ease-of-use.
- A concern was raised that certain GPU mining engineers make modifications to their GPUs that disable the video encoding chips.