Topic: ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It - page 1346. (Read 3917468 times)

IF it is the first ASIC miner in the bitcoin network, it must be in Oct. or Nov., which means that you should put 7200 bitcoin as the daily total output, and this will make a 56% return per week.

And one more thing, if everything goes smoothly and bitcoin exchange rate keeps rally, ASICMINER won't have to spend every bitcoin they raised and it will be given back to the shareholders. (maybe won't have to sell every share of the 200k available.) that will make a even better payback period. Given the potential profit, it is worth to take the risk IMHO.

Thanks for your questions.

We decided to use a different name from the start, because that the ASICMINER shareholders have an extra set of privileges upon Bitfountain shareholders (two of my partners and me).

Yes, it's insanely profitable given that all the given conditions will hold. But "we are first to the market" and the unchanged 15TH/s network hashrate after several months are both strong assumptions.

Before the investors break even, all net profits will be paid to them. So in the first week that's 5,000 BTC minus the electricity fee and place rent.

There are two kinds of failure rates.

The first one is the noise points in mass production. When we get the estimation of 12TH/s we already considered the noise points, or that will be more than 16TH/s on the unrealistic hypothesis that the production process is perfect.

The second one is the failure of making a workable mask-set. It means the waste of the major part of NRE cost. This is the largest risk here and investors should consider this seriously before being in.

The first time that MOORE get boosted will be with or a little after the deploying first batch of our chips. It's like bulk-selling of hashrates from Bitfountain to me myself (I as an individual, am fully responsible of MOORE). So there has to be an approval by shareholders.
Later, if we decide to use MOORE as a future hashrate selling engine, it also needs motion-based approvals.

If at that time, our competitors delivered their products, and the market price of ASIC-based hashrate on the GLBSE market is already settled, we will probably price MOORE at (evolved hashrate at that time with our formula of each share) * (BTC per MH/s) * 1.6. If we are the first to deliver our products, we have to do the price discovery ourselves and what in my mind is keeping the current price of 0.5BTC/share, push the hashrate to 50MH/s per dollar, and fix the hashrate per share based on the BTC/USD exchange rate at that time.

The asics are a quantum leap for mining. So insanely profitable is not unlikely - at least for a few weeks. However, it's a race. The one who has the first working chips will be able to profit the most. Others will just get a fraction of those profits. The real question is the timelag between chip product and mining operation and the rate at which new chips can be added.

At least with ASICMINER the community has an opportunity to participate in the enterprise. AFAIK BFL doesn't offer this - but my guess is they will be doing the same behind the scences and keep all the profits for themselves.

Ok I get it, asicminer is just a glbse asset name representing Bitfountain. It's awefully confusing though. What is the point of choosing a different name if it is one and the same?


If we look at the short term, there are 200,000 public shares that are going to take all the initial profits. The estimated income will be 12TH/s of mining power. Currently the network hashrate is roughly 15TH/s. When 12 TH/s is added you will get 12/27=44% of the daily 25x144=3,600 bitcoins, which is 1,600 BTC/day, or ROI in less than two weeks and a return of 28% per week after that if you're first to market!

If I'm not making any math errors this would be insanely profitable (for a while), and I'm just going to assume it's too good to be true

That is also just gross income in the most optimistic scenario, and I can't find anything about costs. Let's pretend that everything works out and you start mining, and the first week you earn 5,000 BTC. What would the dividend be?


Do you have any estimate of the failure rates? Also, are they somewhat independent between runs, i.e. can we expect that if the failure rate is 10%, say, the probability of all 12 wafers being bad is very small, or is it more likely that if one fails all fails?

I guess my question is what is the likeliest scenario: 1) You get anywhere from 0 to 12 TH/s in the first batch or 2) either 0 or 12 TH/s?


What exactly will MOORE get, and when and at what price?

Thanks. Though some information will be only kept for board members, our progress and milestones will be updated to the public for anyone to see.

Answer to the first question is: our chips are made with I/O simplicity in mind, so there is nothing serious hampering the compatibility on future versions. But as you said, this stage is early and future compatibility is not on the highest priority when making choices.

The second one: We are not planning to disallow that.

There will be. There will also possibly be a small number of free devices for the community. But both needs to be approved with the motions by all shareholders.

Ok im about to be in the market for more mining gear and im going the ASIC way. My faith in BFL being done in time is very low. With that being said I would love to have a choice, and not forced to go with one company. I wish you well in your venture and will be following very very close to progress.

Yes. We are making ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining purpose.

We will be selling the equipments, but are currently not accepting pre-orders.

We are a mining company as well. Since at least the first batch of chips, and probably more, will be consumed by us for self-mining. The investors will get both the profits from self-mining and device-selling.

Or maybe some test batches to investor for testing and feedback?

Im not sure I understand let me just check, If I understand here.
Your making equipment ASIC type, Seems pretty clear but want to make sure.
Are you Selling or not selling this equipment?
You are or are not a mining company as well?

Thanks for your question.

Actually not. One ASICMINER share represents 1/400,000 of the net profits from Bitfountain. Therefore the answer to this question:


will be that:

Investing in ASICMINER is investing in Bitfountain. No matter Bitfountain mines with its own hardware, sells its hardware/hashrates, or even expands its business domain, ASICMINER shareholders get all possible means of profits of Bitfountain proportionally.


This is the most significant problem here. There has to be a way for the board members or wider shareholders to monitor our financials and business operations. Representations could be sent by the board and do much of the job, and when we grow larger some professional auditing will be also very important. We will keep everything as transparent as enough with the help of our investors.

The chips will be as soon as immediately after the first batch of chips are tested by the foundry. But deploying of the newly produced chips still takes some time (PCB production, mining operation creation, employees and rents from expansion, etc).

On the chips' side, in our recent investigation to the foundry, it told us that although the minimum requirement for the first batch is 12 wafers, we have the privilege to stop paying the rest 9 ones if the first 3 ones fail to test. Therefore, the "first batch" is re-defined from 12 wafers to 3 wafers, and this is a good thing, because we could register the actual first batch as much more than number of 12 and don't have to pay for them before the mask set is proved to be correct.

If I understand correctly, Bitfountain is doing the manufacturing and ASICMINER is buying the equipment from them.

My questions:

- If you were sneaky you would siphon off some portion of the chips to yourself. You can get the chips for marginal cost and get insane profit from these. The ASICMINER investor is none the wiser and picks up the tab for the development, since ASICMINER is not involved and can keep totally open books. As long as you don't get too greedy you will be able to pull it off, as the new 'mystery miner'.

I'm not saying you will do this but I would like to hear your response.

- Is there a way for me to invest in Bitfountain directly? That seems much more interesting to me. You know, the only one making money from the gold rush was the guy selling shovels. I'm already too exposed to the mining risks, but selling shovels seems like a plan

@silverbox

friedcat is a bitcoin believer. If he succeeds,  the bitcoin network will only be more secure and I'm more confident about the future of bitcoin.  Only the government and some irrational attackers controlled the ASIC technology will damage the security of bitcoin.

Friedcat will sell the ASIC mining rigs to the community for profit. Sooner or later, there will be other ASIC like BFL/largecoin which contribute to the total hashing rate.The competition will make cheap ASIC mining rigs distributed to every corner around the world, and it will make the bitcoin hater even more impossible to attack the bitcoin network.

If the first batch of chips are proved to be successful, how soon will the next batch of chips come out and be ready for mining? I'm financial modeling this venture.

Ah yes, I see your problem. You could do it, but having a 3rd party verify your hashrates by using a pool would be them confirming the numbers.

I'm not familiar with p2pool. We want to always make our hashrates public, or our financials won't be transparent enough. I wonder if it is easy to identify how much hashrates are contributed by us from the p2pool statistics alone.

Going p2pool from the start with that sort of hashing power would probably be a good idea. Alone you could be bigger than any other pool, unless their was a pool you really wanted to mine on.

Thanks for answering when I was away. Yes, we are part of the Bitcoin world and rely on the security of Bitcoin to succeed. And if we ever reach 51%, we could use p2pool, or scatter our hashrates to different mining pools with explicit names like ASICMINER, and hence make the statistics public to all people who are concerned.

Update

Here we show something visual.

The first picture is the IC layout of the whole chip after P&R. The big cyan bar in the bottom center is the pins of the chip. Purple bars above and below the chip, as well as the light blue bars in the left and the right of the chip, are all power pads. The small rectangle in the bottom left is the blackbox of PLL IP module. The rest parts are real hashing units doing the actual job of erupting blocks.



The second picture is a magnified local part of the hashing unit. It's harder to tell which part is which in this picture, but it feels very nice for us to see how our logic design turns out physical.