Topic: [HAVELOCK] AlcheMiner Scrypt ASIC - page 4. (Read 24550 times)

Hi Guys,
I'm currently running an open Q&A thread on Reddit in /r/bitcoinstocks if any lurkers here have any questions about the IPO or the company.

Also, we should have some very positive news coming today or this weekend; stay tuned!

Korbman, I have confirmed that, in the case of late August/September shipping, more chips will be added per unit to provide the increased hashrate. In addition, pre-order funds will be kept separate from manufacturing funds in order to provide full refunds if the Alchemists are too far delayed (October or later).

Thanks to all of our investors so far!

The AlcheMiner Team wanted me to thank all of our investors so far - to date we have raised over 370 BTC on HavelockInvestments.com!

I also wanted to provide some reference for the power consumption announcement made earlier this week. Tom announced that the Alchemist only consumes 3W per MH/s (3 Watts per Megahash).

For those of you that may not have mined Scrypt coins before, a GPU Scrypt Miner normally consumes 300W - 500W per MH. Even the Gridseed ASICs that are currently on the market consume 7W per 350KH/s Unit, or 20W per MH - nearly 7 times more than an Alchemist unit!

An Alchemist 128MH/s unit will therefore consume approximately 384W or less - less than the power consumption of two standard Radeon R9 GPUs   

We welcome all questions, so please feel free to ask away!

Thanks for the input - what I really meant to impart was that the company sees a much bigger opportunity in the Scrypt ASIC space vs. SHA-256 due to the lesser amount of competition in the Scrypt ASIC space. We definitely also believe that the Scyrpt mining market will move from GPU to ASIC very rapidly over the next few months - we're going to be a part of that 



Other companies that have made similar promises have done so by either providing additional hardware or increasing the number of chips/boards/'blades' within a single unit. I'll be happy to get more information about the contingency plan, however.



You're welcome!

Tom's Employment at Realtek and Alchip

I know that some have asked for additional verification of Tom's former employment at Realtek and Alchip. Tom has provided his business cards and employee badges for both companies here: http://imgur.com/aAnBkS1

We will also see if we can have some former coworkers write recommendations for him on his LinkedIn account-

Obviously this is rhetoric we've heard before, so my question now comes down to "How?"
Starting with the hashrate increase compensation, how will that work? Would they overclock the chips? Send additional hardware?

Just a remark, having participated in Scrypt FPGA / ASIC project, Scrypt mining device is much harder, and requires significant resources (including financial) to properly implement, thus I'm not sure this Scrypt - SHA256 comparison is entirely correct. As per Scrypt market being dominated by GPU miners, this probably going to change within next 3 - 4 months.

There were questions posed both here and on Litecointalk - I wanted to post the answers in both places to ensure that everyone has access to the most updated information!

Cost Information: Regarding the $3.6M for manufacturing, the cost is around $1.5 - $2M for 40nm mask and tooling and about $1.5M - $2M for wafers, packaging, and equipment assembly. The team is only able to provide these top-level numbers to investors for two reasons. The first is that the exact numbers are protected under NDA with the manufacturers. Second, the company wants to keep the exact margins under wraps to ensure that they can provide both a good cost to customers and still provide a reasonable profit to investors without favoring one more heavily than the other.

Angel Investment Amount: On this point, the company can't disclose exact numbers. However, as it was previously mentioned by Korbman, seed funding is given some preference in terms of equity since that was the funding that got the company to this point. IPO investors are able to take advantage of the development already set in motion by the seed funding.

ASIC Verification / Manufacturing Process: The company will have finished the backend design and tape out to the foundry before the end of April.

Scrypt vs. SHA-256: As I mentioned earlier, and confirmed by the founders, the SHA-256 ASIC mining industry is full of entrenched players with deep pockets. The Scrypt Mining industry is just now beginning to develop, which offers the company much more room for growth and at a significantly reduced cost compared to trying to break into the SHA-256 (BTC) mining industry. Plus, Scrypt mining is still dominated by GPU miners, not ASIC miners/manufacturers. The playing field is wide open, so to speak.

The AlcheMiner Office: AlcheMiner welcomes investors to visit the company's office at Taipei 101 as the company's schedule permits. Please contact me if you plan to visit the office and I'll be happy to forward along the request to Sophia.

KNC's Titan: We've been asked a good deal about how the 128MH/s Alchemist can be offered at the same price point as the Titan, which will start shipping "Q2/Q3". As shown by Bitcoin's fast-increasing difficulty which is now mirrored the rapid decrease in Scrypt mining profitability as of late, the eternal business motto rings true: Time is Money. In other words, he who mines first mines most!

KNC has merely given an estimated started shipping date of "Q2/Q3" without any schedule guarantee; their design is not even FPGA proven at this time. It's very likely that they won't even begin shipping until the end of September. If they ship one Titan before the end of Sep, they've technically met their schedule as well! In addition, their pre-order has now exceeded 1,000 miners. So, even if a customers decides to order a Titan now, they've got over a thousand people in line ahead of them.

To contrast, AlcheMiner is offering the July Shipping Guarantee AND is backing it up with increased hashrate or money-back. In the case that there is a delay and the miners ship in August, AlcheMiner will provide an additional 15% hashrate increase to compensate. September - 30%. If October or later, the company will issue a 100% refund!

So, it's not a simple as looking at it from a $/MH perspective. While it may look like the Titan is a better deal at face value, AlcheMiner's advanced shipping date is much more significant. Our customers have told us that they can't wait for KNC - they would rather order from us and get their miner as soon as possible than roll the dice with KNC.

In addition, other players in the Scrypt ASIC space, like Alpha Tech, have opted to move up their shipping date instead of trying to match KNC's $/MH rate. Alpha's Viper is shipping in July as well, albeit at a higher cost compared to the Alchemist. Experienced miners know that time really does equate to money in this industry.

Finally, AlcheMiner's development schedule is on-track - we are going to tape out to the found later this month. Reps from the foundry visited very recently and the company has secured a certain amount of wafers for July shipment.

Liquidation of the Company: If the company is liquidated, then Angels and IPO investors are still placed ahead of the Founders' shares (assuming that the Angels and IPO Investors had not yet recouped their initial investment). Angels and IPO Investors would receive the liquidation funds back on a proportional basis. If there are additional funds left after that point, it would be distributed among all shareholders proportionally (Founders' shares included). Basically, the liquidation of the company doesn't relieve the company's promise to pay back investors first.

Dividend Payments: Dividends will be paid in BTC via Havelock. The vast majority of preorders are paid in USD, so the profits after shipping the miners will need to be converted to BTC for payment. The company's accounting rules require that the miners are delivered to customers before realizing profits and paying dividends to investors.

Tom's Previous Employment at Realtek: The CEO, Tom Soong, has previously worked at Realtek and Alchip. Because he is no longer employed by either company, he does not retain those corporate email accounts. I will work with Tom and Sophia to see what we can do to further verify his previous employment. Please note that Havelock has already worked on verifying his previous employment experience and it has completely checked out.

The IPO shares sales are starting to pick up - thanks to everyone who has invested so far!

If the total amount of funding is not raised, the IPO will not be successful and all investors will receive their funds back. The funds are held in escrow by Havelock at the moment.

Regarding the $3.6M for manufacturing, the cost is around $1.5 - $2M for 40nm mask and tooling and about $1.5M - $2M for wafers, packaging, and equipment assembly. I'm working to get more detailed numbers if possible.


Korbman is correct on this point; funding that gets the company going is nearly always valued higher than the funding of the retail/IPO investor - the reason is that that funding has gotten the IPO to this point; a lot of time and money has already been spent to get here.

In addition, neither Tom nor Sophia has taken a salary yet. IC design isn't cheap - you have to spend the money to get the good engineering talent required for a project like this. In addition,  a 40nm backend design project can cost upwards of $400,0000.


Ken, thanks for the questions - I'll let you know when I have responses from the founders for you. For the first point, the SHA-256 ASIC is extremely competitive and has many well-funded, entrenched companies already in the space. Scrypt ASIC is just now coming to market, allowing lower competition to AlcheMiner and more potential profit than SHA-256.


Thanks for the questions - I'll see if the company can disclose how much as been invested by Angels/VCs so far. Regarding salary, Sophia and Tom have not taken any salary yet - I would hope that investors see both that and the promise to pay profits to investors first as a sign of faith in the company and its business model.

I'll be back in touch with responses from the founders regarding the stages of development; July is the delivery date which should precede KNC's shipping and match Alpha's shipping time (with better power consumption and $/MH).


Finally, a great announcement from the engineering team regarding power consumption! This was taken from the press release, so please excuse the PR-speak 

04/12/14

The Most Power Efficient Scrypt Mining Chip Announced to Date: AlcheMiner Has Achieved Significant Technology Breakthrough in Power Consumption with Less than 3W per Mh/s.

Mr. Tom Soong, CEO of AlcheMiner, is pleased to announce that our engineering team has achieved technology breakthrough in power consumption. Specifically, AlcheMiner’s newly developed Scrypt mining chip is expected to attain less than 3W per Mh/s based on assessment by backend IC design tools.

Mr. Tom Soong said, “To our best knowledge, this is the most power efficient Scrypt mining chip announced to date. We are glad that our engineering team is able to deliver such brilliant results. This technology breakthrough will significantly reduce AlcheMiner’s customers’ electricity cost.”

Some questions for ALC,
1. Why focus on Scrypt miner not SHA256 miner. What's the strategy behind that?

2. So far KNC's Titan scrypt miner is 2 times efficient than ALC's miner. And both the price are the same. And we all know KNC is a promising company so those data are very likely to be true. Do you think 3 months ship date ahead KNC's Titan is worthy the high price?

3. Do you mind a investor or customer visit in your Taipei 101 office? 

Any plans on reviewing your Ipo, people here would love to invest and believe in you, just fix your numbers and ask for something realistic of us investors!

we all feel pity for the NEOBEE or COG.

Sounds good, thanks for the update.


Just wanted to touch on this part specifically. In just about all cases, yes, Angel investors receive their shares vastly cheaper than IPO investors. I'll speculate that in this case the Angels put in less than $1M to help get the company off the ground. Since VC and Angel investing can be quite risky, it's normal to see a smaller investment be worth 20-30% of a company prior to IPO.

1. Can you be more specific about the VC funding received so far? How much money has been invested by VC's?
My fear/impression is that the VC's got their shares much cheaper than IPO investors. To my understanding, developing a chip up to the mask is not that expensive and surely does not cost $4 Mio (that would be >20-40 man years in salary!!!). There are many ASIC companies that develop a working prototype up to the mask using only 30% of the pre-order money (e.g. Alpha-tech).

2. What salary was/is paid to the founders and head of development? Surely they should be working for a low salary given their high profit share (30%)?
I see the risk that AlcheMiner ends up not profitable, not only because of market risk and extreme competition, but also because certain key figures earn a very high fixed salary. Who would control/prevent this?

3. How do you expect to compete time-wise? When did you start with the ASIC verification etc.? KnC passed the RTL stage, Fibonacci is also starting tape out later this quarter.

Thanks very much! Sophia and Tom are Taiwan-based, so they're asleep at the moment. I'll check back in with as much information as I can get regarding a more detailed breakdown of manufacturing and sourcing costs from the $3.6M. I'm US-based in order to have a schedule that more closely matches the forums' North America / Europe population (the Securities subforum is most frequented during these continents' waking hours). I've been brought on to the team to help out with with investor communications so I won't always have the information on-hand, but I do have direct contact with the Taiwan-based team and Havelock as well.


At the moment, altcoins like Litecoin and Dogecoin are proven and side-chains are still mostly 'waiting in the wings', so to speak. In addition, there's no reason that altcoins and side-chains couldn't co-exist, much like Colored Coins / Decentralized Exchanges existing side-by-side with centralized exchanges.

So, while side-chains may become more prevalent in the future, Scrypt-based altcoins are here and in-demand and we plan to satisfy that demand.

Mabsy, I'm shocked at this, but I've been thinking this exact same thing since reading up on side-chains.

Cheers!

Are you guys not worried about side-chains killing off the alt-chains?

That's sort of what I figured (and freedomno1 pointed out my oversight before), but there wasn't any detail surrounding it in the prospectus. In any case, thank you for the clarification.
Quick question: How did you guys arrive at the $3.6M figure for mass manufacturing, and what happens if you only end up raising, say, 10% of the total $4M?

Congrats on the chip by the way!

Hi Korbman, we wanted to address this question specifically. The Angel's Seed funding has gotten the company to this point - a working, low-power, Scrypt mining chip. It takes significant time and R&D funds to get to this point.

The $3.6 Million will be used to manufacture the chips and manufacture/source the remainder of the Alchemist's necessary components. The $400,000 remaining (listed as R&D on the prospectus) will be used for rent, staff costs, accommodations for business partners, and any other incidental R&D costs or costs otherwise. Basically, operating funds needed to get everything prepared for shipping in July.

For the record. Havelock Investments never offered NEOBEE or COG.
NEOBEE was a pass-through Fund.
COG was listed elsewhere and their shareholders requested to be listed on our exchange.
We no longer offer pass-thorough Funds unless the direct shares are managed directly by us as we do with the ASICMiner Fund.

Cheers!

Replacement for NEOBEE[Q] and COG?
I agree.