Topic: Why the Bitcoin community HAS to save the network from HashFast, CoinTerra, BFL. (Read 9870 times)

hi guys

so when our asic will be ready?

i m trying to make a 35 nm of around 0.8giga on small die and it s damn complicated

how are your plan s is going?do you have a design or else already?

fab is choosen or yet?

keep me posted

thanks

you just don't get it man. Its the corporations ASIC makers keeping down the people! We will build our own society ASIC's using vegan fair trade silicon and there will be peace and love and drum circles forever.

Competition, that's what it takes, notice the prices dropping as new ASIC companies come about.


The price of ASICS is determined by what people are willing to pay. You have many people willing to pay $3500 for the asic, if you provide asics at a much more reasonable $350 for the same hash, you'll have that same person buying 10. If you can fully supply with no delays, you'll have an even more massive spike in difficulty, thus making the ROI in the same ballpark as it is now. On top of that, if OurASIC isn't making much of a margin, your customers will be, as the OurASIC devices will end up at auction to whomever is willing to pay the premium.

The hardware companies aren't mining on everyone's preorders, the money is in the profit margins of the ASICS,, the more they sell, the more they will sell. It's a very unique industry. Cars, TVs, Computers, the more you sell, the more your sales slow down as the market is saturated, ASICS? The more you saturate the market, the more you will sell.

Not sure where to begin.  Number one probably is that bitcoin community isn't a sick animal so there is nothing to save.  It's just a lot of different people doing different things for many different reasons.  Number two I'd love to here how much you are willing to contribute to this saving crusade seeing that you said you are bitcoin veterans.  But this is all bound to fail since you seem to just want to move profits around from one group to another nothing else.  Let's imagine for a second a magic box into which you can stick 2 mil worth of bitcoins and out will pop ASIC design for you.  Now what?  You say we are going to let it be open source and then "the community" will have cheap chips.  Really?  How are you picturing this working?  Joe in America, or Sebastian in Germany, or Ming in China will just call up TSMC and order a few chips they can screw onto their iPad with a dirty screwdriver and out pops an ASIC miner?  What will happen is ASIC manufacturers will order these chips manufacter a miner and guess how much they will charge to sell it?  MARKET PRICE. So in this instance you propose to take all these crusader bitcoin community savers money and transfer it to these other ASIC manufacturers.  Right?  So you say no way this greed is bad we will make our own miners to sell below market price.  Ok let's see how that will work.  You hire some people to build these miner but now you have to somehow select who gets them below market price since everyone wants 10 and obviously if you sell them all to them it's no longer below market price so you have to pick winners somehow.  Maybe you have a lottery or your employees start picking their friends names out of the hat and the the rumors start that someone is selling them at market prices out the back door ala BFL rumors.  You start shipping and all of a sudden they start getting "lost" or "stolen" or "broken" because people want a few extra at below market prices.  Is this what you had in mind to save the bitcoin community? 

We did not vanish. We were just doing further market research to make sure the project is feasible. We are more confidant than before in the community's ability to execute this project. First steps first, we need to select the treasurers. A new thread will be created to take nominations from the community. For the next 3 days, everyone would be able to nominate members of bitcointalk.org for the role of the treasurers. Only "Full Members", or "Sr Members" or "Hero Members" can be nominated. After 3 days, we will create a poll with a list of all the nominations. The poll will run for another 3 days. The top 10 members voted will be selected as treasurers.

In the meanwhile, we will be contacting different ASIC design companies to get formal quotes for the design.

If the original concept of the post is correct. I think the best way to push the hardware providers to sell the equipment instead of mining with our pre-buy money, is to do a massive BTC sell, the price should go down and in panic they will deliver the units to avoid refunds and to get more orders and profit on hardware.

Probably is impossible to organize such massive coorditaned BTC sell.

:-)

TMC

You know what, just because the idea was abandoned, doesn't mean its not good or a bad idea. I think, DZ, we are in a better position to either start another similar movement or continue this.

We could form something, talk to certain chip makers, talk to fabricators, talk to engineers, do the whole thing, except we are not a company. We are not a corporation. We don't even have to be a cooperative.

Key people are important, of course. But, take bitcoin itself. We have been abandoned, by the founder, but the project continues. Maybe he's out there? Just watching? We don't know.

Open source. Chips. Designs. Boards. Miners. Fabs. 130nm, 65, 55, 28, 14. 300 MH/s, 600, 1 GH/s, 2, 5, 10.

Imagine, whether or not we make money, but thousands of individuals have access or the power, each one doing 500 GH/s or more.

As Andrew Carnegie once said, I'd rather have 1% of the efforts of 100 people, than 100% all by myself.

Shall I start recruiting? Or do we wait for volunteers?

I had this dream or vision of forming an association of bitcoin escrow agents. Never had a need, and I thought it would be like herding cats.

I think reality smacked him hard with the hammer of truth. The world sucks get used to it 

Nah, Dabs, I wasn't talking about *us* abandoning customers.

I'm talking about the Original Posters - OurAsic - just up & vanishing, after trying to pull the strangest pump & dump scam or bait & switch scam I've ever seen.

The Mary Celeste was found abandoned, much like we found this thread: abandoned!  

Hey buddy! Do you "vett for free"? hehehe. I got a Group Buy.

I dunno about being the "Mary Celeste", what I do know is that immediately after Zefir's first Group Buy of Avalon chips, I started the 2nd Group Buy of Avalon chips at almost the same time as (or even earlier than) SebastianJu's. Which turned out to be a failure. (Their's eventually also failed, but at least the first batches of chips arrived.)

As the "Captain" I did not abandon my "crew". I got abandoned. (All fully refunded.) But had the fortune to be included in another mining venture.


I'm a lone worker. Even though I stand to make a profit, or even if I don't, it's going to be an experience and some fun being one of the little guys that could.

I do believe almost all ASIC devices are overpriced or will not ROI within a month. But coming from an offline, brick and mortar, traditional business perspective, something that ROIs under 2 or 3 years is very good.

At first I tried to offer chips. DIY. Didn't work. Now, hopefully, people take advantage of working finished products, at least for the novelty, for the fun, and for the benefit of the bitcoin network.

Will they make money? Probably not. But you have a blinking light!

Will I make money? I think the correct question is, would it be worth my time and effort? Probably not. It's going to be real work packaging and sending off 30, 300 or 3000 units, and it's possible I'm just going to cover my costs. I will probably be better off working my normal job or business, but I did say I'm doing this on my spare time after regular office hours.

Will it be fun? Probably. At least, that's what I'm counting on.

The key here is watts/hash/$$.

If we can get cheapish miners to the masses we win.

Corps have cost's

I can run 1 kw of miners without to much pain and itching on my electricity bill.

The big miners has huge costs. Dual supply's and Ups's do not come cheap. Genny back up, rack mounts, dual switching networking not to mention static switches.. These all come at huge cost.

Trust me, us little guys can stay solvent way longer than the big boys.

If we can level the hardware costs the big boys are toast, and as they shut down then we make the $$$'s 

Thank you OurASIC and all above for bringing community sourced ASICs back to foreground.

The most important thing is having a vision and transform it into real, viable plan. The discussion is already lit up. That's the best way to get there.

We might argue if a company is evil or not when trying to max profit at free market while staying in compliance with law. But that's not the important bit.

The most important question that enables us to forge viable plan: What is our advantage as a community over a "evil" company?

As many of you suggested above, market does apply to a community project same as commercial one. (People wouldn't buy community ASIC when there is better commercial deal.) So, let's see what community can do better than a commercial start-up.

Personally, I think our biggest advantage is being able to take the time to develop as good as it gets. A ASIC commercial company needs to make profit as soon as possible. Their chips could be twice (maybe more) as good, but the capital they use is not their own and expenses on keeping investment grow in time. They have to make some fiat profit fast.

The second big advantage (still my personal opinions) is community funding "as seen on Kickstarter". I would give my money to open community project where I know where my money goes, whats the state of it and the "never done before" goal we share. Where having it stuck as pre-order at some company is scary. My money could be on their way to Bahamas already.

And the third is the brains. A commercial company can offer money to developers, and then throw them away when they done their job. We can offer money too, but on top of that, well ... Companies come and go. ... We as a community are here to stay as long as there is math and some kind of money in the world.

What do you think is our advantage(s) if any?

Hey Dabs! How are you buddy?

Well, 2 of their 10 requested treasurer candidates showed up with qualifications to spare, but there doesn't appear to be a there there.

We seem to have arrived on the Custom Hardware forum equivalent of the Mary Celeste: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history-archaeology/abandoned-200711.html


However, OurASIC is founded in Delaware allegedly. Hmm, isn't VMC founded in Delaware too? Coincidental?

You know, there are literally hundreds and thousands of people contributing to distributed networks without making profit at all.

Folding proteins, looking for aliens, calculating large prime numbers, factoring RSA numbers, ... while bitcoin will have those who are in it just for the profits, there are those individuals who will mine just because they can, with whatever hardware they can use.

As for this OurAsic, I volunteer to be one of the treasurers. You can look me up and see if I can be trusted with thousands of coins in escrow. I've always wanted to escrow a 100,000 BTC transaction, maybe now I can.

Well lets see some of those well known names

I agree with btc-engineer on many points
Many of my posts and talks on irc for example bitminter i have mentioned that Asic chips are extreme cheap
Ofcourse it also depends on the initial bought numbers to produce, but in general they are pretty damn cheap.
In great numbers asic cost not even $5 to 10 to be made
Somehow nobody wanted the listen because of the mass only see the massive hash power they do.

That being said does not mean a miner as a complete package will be cheap, it greatly depends on how and with what quality such a device is build. I have not see the kncminer up close yet. But far as i can see on the pictures, they are building pretty good quality hardware.

Ofcourse that they ask this steep prices is because the market is there, so they take what people accept.
However they all are overpriced and all asic builders know that, and will continue till profitabilty on mining drops below the hashpower produced by the hardware.
If you can get this done before next year when the net will be flooded with massive datacenters full of hardware coming to get the most coins you can make the smaller miners happy till these massive machines run.
I think after this has happened mining is not for the masses anymore but for the biggest wallet people out there and investment companies.

Who else are able to invest many millions in hardware, not me i am just a super tiny miner not even getting 0.01 a day
In a like 6 months my newly bought hardware will be useless, and probably will not even make the money i put into it.

The big players and the current hardware sellers who plan to mine on their own wil be the winners, they got huge profits and can invest them back into even better hardware. Many do allready and as far as i know all are mining with pretty big numbers on the net.

Can I join?

Approx. 28 posts & well over a day since OP visited this post. Hmm, one would think that one would tend better to one's launch thread if put in a similar position.  

Anyway, in the small hope that you guys are serious & not another person or group of persons trying to do a "pump & dump" type scheme, here's my credentials as a possible treasurer, besides reading through my first 2 Group Buy threads:


Approx. value of GBEC / GBC ASIC pre-order sales or pre-sales of shares on this (the GB) forum by DZ in last 5 weeks: $10.1-11.1K
Approx. value of DZ ebay sales (including 4 HF Baby Jet shares listed on ebay/BTC Talk GB forum & purchased on ebay worth $620) since Aug.1 : $3.3K
Approx. value of ASIC related hardware or services currently listed items on ebay by DZ: $30.5K, selling as a trusted intermediary
Several new GBCs and Bitcoin Miner Hosts vetted for free, and several scams pointed out on two BTC related forums.
-Data current as of 9/17/2013

I rest my case, your honor.   I'd also tell you guys to chill the phuck out about possible libelous/defamatory statements about competitors. Fo' free.

Very nice project.
I think that the competitive nature of the capitalism system we live in will acheive the same within a nine montb time frame..  Asic being quite new, those kind of profit taking from manufacturer are normal and wont last..

Just my two satoshi

Start a topic for treasurer nominations already!

Anyway you can put me in the hat as the first Group Buy Coordinator willing to throw my hat to be a treasurer in if you guys are serious and if this project goes anywhere.

I run a small miner co-op that currently has 18 members with 2 of them knowing the exact research lab and location that I work at. I also vet and coach new Group Buy Coordinators and Bitcoin Miner Hosts for free in the hopes of doing future business with them. I've also been vetted by John K. & he's seen my LinkedIn profile with multiple dozen Hawaii/US Aerospace/IT/R&D professional endorsements and a 162 perfect feedback rating on ebay as my wife's co-seller/buyer of IT hardware. I can also perform escrowed BTC transactions as a BTCrow Escrow Affiliate. I advocate for both buyers and sellers and, in any arbitration, will side with the one having the strongest evidence and least scammy behavior.

My collateral in any financial transaction I do here is: my job/freedom/ability to work on low TRL projects and get paid to do it. Anyone willing to handle someone else's BTC/cash/PP/ID/miner payouts on these forum needs to put up those same type of guarantees to do business around here IMO. And you should use escrow from a trusted provider whenever possible.

OurAsic: I like what you're trying to do here with the openness you're trying to establish as open source software/hardware for 28nm ASIC chips.

I do have issues with the way you worded the release as it's combative and unnecessarily somewhat libelous by stereotyping every manufacturer you listed as evil and greedy when the jury is still out on 2 of the 3.   If I was editing your PR I'd caution that it's been proven that you attract more flies with honey than vinegar. Even if you *are* angry and bitter from being scammed: you shouldn't bring your at-home issues to work is what I was always told.

People are people. While business and politics seem to attract an abnormally large percentage of that "2-3%" that are mentally damaged or impaired such as sociopaths and psychopaths, most folks are decent people just trying to get by as their country's currency continues to inflate (some at ruinous levels), and are people that follow the laws and social mores of their culture, for the most part, eheh.

Perhaps if you had grown up in a hierarchical culture instead of an egalitarian one (relevant thread: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.3154478 ) you may have found a way to still gain customers by calling attention to current product availability without resorting to negative (and possibly libelous) comments about any particular manufacturer.

BTW, as far as the nature of Greed: I don't want to say "greed is good" like Gordon Gekko but that same greed helped bring our ancestors out of trees and helped them to explore new vistas with all the concomitant unforeseen changes that would be unleashed as we went forward as a species. That same "greed" makes you get up in the morning and go to your job so you can continue to not live in a cardboard box.

Risk taking is good in a species. Extraordinary risk as a species overall, is probably ruinous, but risk taking is what helps makes us human and helps us to feel alive!

will you, maybe make also a 12nm one too (time permitting of course) 

Agreed. It is now the hoard of ASIC's.

I understand your point. In generally I don't have anything against a free market. In this specific case, the mining equipment is securing the bitcoin network, so I'm interested in a decentralized mining infrastructure. At the moment the owners of ASIC designs are able to bring up hashing power with cost of manufacturing, and all others have to pay a much higher price. This potentially leads to mining centralism, which is not a good thing.

To stay in your example with the 28nm/400GH chips for $50 in the hand of the bitcoin community. With such a available design it would be much harder than at the moment to make money by taking the risk of a new design. I think even the best ASIC experts will think twice before taking such a risk. In my opinion bitfury's 55nm design has already squeezed out a lot of the 55nm potential. I don't expect that someone is able to improve the numbers by let's say factor 2 with the same technology. On the other hand a step into a newer technology, like 28nm, is not automatically bringing so much more benefit. The problem is the up-going heat per area, which leads to complex, expensive cooling requirements. I'm interested to see how all of the 28nm announcements are solving this problem.
Anyhow, you can see already now that the cooling efforts are increasing (water cooling etc.) and the efficiency is not getting soo much better. About 0.5W/GH is also reachable with the bitfury design. I would be more convinced about the step to 28nm, if I would see <<0.2W/GH, which doesn't seem to be the case at the moment.  

Let's say you open source a 28nm Asic that does say 400ghz per chip and costs $50 and you sell them at cost. Someone, somewhere will make a better chip if it is commercially viable and then you are back to square one.

People are buying from the current ASIC manufacturers out of free will, there is no monopoly or evidence of a price fixing cartel. There are options for all wallets and ability's (ASICMINER USB to BFL Minirig and more on the horizon). If the high price of entry is such an issue these companies would quickly go bankrupt as they would not be able to sell products if people do not want to buy them.

This is exactly the same as people who bitch about Walmart coming to town and killing Main Street, when it is the people themselves shopping at Walmart that kills the independents. Don't like it don't buy, see how long a company survives with no customers.

I don't think it's so important which technology will be used etc.

The important point of OurASIC was, as far as I understood him, that an ASIC design should get into the hand of the bitcoin community.
So different groups can get this ASIC's for cost of manufacture and can build different, competing miner designs for the market.
Because of the extremely high engineering costs of a new ASIC design, this is not really true at the moment. Only big players have their own design and are selling ASIC's for very high prices.

Personally I like bitfury's ASIC design a lot. It's "only" made on 55nm technology, but very well design and can still compete with the current 28nm design announcements. If the community would have a design like that, I would already be happy. Let's say we would get the ASIC incl. packaging in volumes for about 1.5$, which is not unrealistic. The costs for the chips for a 400GH setup would be around $200. Without the need for complex and expensive cooling requirements like water-cooling etc.

Maybe it would make sense to check if the money for an own ASIC design, could be spend in a better way by just buying an existing ASIC design like the one from bitfury and open-source it.

    
 

 

"save the bitcoin network" isnt a valid argument anymore.

thats early btc adopters + asic manufactures propaganda.

^ agreed.  And "save the bitcoin network!" is a hippie mentality.. I am picturing them chaining themselves up to trees, but in this case it's the blockchain.   I doubt these actions would stop the bulldozers.   Mining isn't for the little guy, plain and simple.  

Because it Lets the free market work its magic. If they can't match the price they fold.

How flooding the market with $100 ASICs suppose to save the mining community?

It will accomplish the opposite.  You'll need $25K minimum to invest in h/w to make BTC1+/day.  Same as today.

People with deep pockets will just hoard the chips and small guys will be left out there with few 500GH/s chips that
will make BTC1/year.  All will change is the arithmetic.  The proportions of ROI/profit/diff will stay more less the same.

I think the rest of this mining ASIC cycle will not be done by mining community at large, but a small group companies who
already got enough money from their gen1 products to go completely solo with their next gen chips.  Think Avalon/ASICMiner and Bitfury.

They might still "offer" border line ROI products, just like bitfury and ASICMiner is doing today.

Let the free market work its magic.   Interfering with it is wrong.  

Sure it is painful to watch ghash.io reap 1000s of coins a day, but it does not really matter who mines those coins.
If you don't like the current ASIC offerings, just vote them out with your wallet.  KNC, HF, CT will be mining with your pre-order money, just like BFL and Avalon did.

Your effort will only speed up the process.  
Bitcoin is an example of ruthless (or real) capitalism (not the gov sponsored capitalism we have today).  Let it be, it does not need fixing.

Lol, not much smaller than 28nm atm. The ROI on anything smaller will be terrible, way to bleeding edge.

This seems to be the popular opinion right now.. but if Bitcoin starts tanking, you're all going to blindly jump into mining again right?   

Very interesting and I am interested to support the effort if the details all line up.

My biggest general concern is "are we too late" when it comes to keeping up with folks who are basically at 28nm now, and moving to smaller soon...

fuck them all.

just dont buy them.

if asic manufactures are asking for so much money for their ASICS, leave it to them to secure the network, and just buy and hold bitcoins.

Cant you see what nonsense that is? Mining companies will sell every asic they can produce, the only variable is price and shipping date. Its impossible for them to sell at a lower price and still get the same revenue, thats laughable. Lowering prices will not help a thing for anyone, since these companies are already selling out and lower prices would increase demand which they cant fullfill.


Cointerra started lasted week?  More nonsense.  The company was founded in April and doesnt expect products until the end of the year.
If anything, 6 months for a 28nm design cycle is a very aggressive schedule.

if it were so easy to design an asic, everyone would be doing it.  its not a week to design an asic.  im pretty sure cointerra and hashfast have taken (skilled, experienced asic designers) something like 6 months, certainly closer to 6 months than 1 week

since youve got vmc and others offering a 16 GH chip in 28nm, and knc offering a 100 GH chip in 28nm, and hashfast on 400 GH and cointerra on 500 GH.. then clearly, the design of the chip is the thing that differentiates the performance, and i think the performance these guys are hitting is represenative directly of the skill of their asic designers (and the time they've taken to optimise the power consumption).  thus its not just any old sha design thrown together and it seems like the skill of the engineers does actually make a difference to the design and enables the consequent performance.  and to achieve your desired goal in the 400-600 GH range, that is a very high end, state of the art chip, and will not be achieved just by throwing together some public domain sha engines without any effort or skill required, - if it were true anyone and everyone would be doing it.  in order to reach that level of performance you will need to do serious engineering to lower the power consumption and improve efficiency or you will butt up to the thermal limit of the chip without hitting the performance goal

May I ask how do you plan to effectively control the rate of difficulty climb?

Explain it to me, because I don't understand. Even if you are extra-ordinarily cheap by the time you release your ASIC, the prices from other vendors will probably already be matching yours.



For example, I created a CoinTerra chart a few days ago as to where their prices should be as difficulty climbs. If you look carefully by the time you ship, you will have to compete with them at their price point.

I don't quite understand how your company plans to lower ASIC prices (assuming this is the plan) to stop the crazy rise of difficulty?

http://s9.postimg.org/hcigp57fz/Terra_Miner_4_2_TH.png

if you think you can sell a chip that does 400-600 GH in 28nm, at $200, and somehow make a decent profit, youre wrong.  these chips, running at, say 0.6 watts/GH, are generating the top end of heat that any chip is allowed to generate (250-300 watts!) thus these chips and their packages, and their high performance cooling system would cost more than $200 each.

Then youve ignored the cost of the nre?  that needs to come out of the cost of each chip, ie: amortised over however many chips you plan to sell.

if youre going to sell 10,000 chips (which seems like a lot), then divide the $3m+ nre cost, over the 10,000 chips (ie: add $300 on top of the cost of each chip, before you can sell it at zero margin.  lets say it costs $250-300 each, for the die, the package, and the cooling system).  plus $300 contribution for the nre cost, and youre already at $600 minimum price that you could sell each chip - at zero profit margin !

-- Jez

Very interesting post. It coincides with a lot of my ideas about the future of bitcoin mining.
I would love to work in any kind of way on a fully open source ASIC project.   

Did you even read his post? He never said that those companies should not make profit. He says they could make an equal amount of profit by selling at a lower price but higher quantity. That will not only make mining more fair for everyone but also also these companies who lie and deliberately delay delivery will have to compete by providing gear on time.

Also it does NOT take 6+ months to design an ASIC that does something as basic as SHA. Cointerra just started their design a week ago and are going to deliver in December.

1. Completely untrue. At the very beginning (2009-2010), the market at the time was just not big enough to warrant investing even $150k to develop a 130nm ASIC. Plus Bitcoin's future success was very uncertain (legally and technologically speaking), so it would have been a very risky venture. ASICs were seen as inevitable, provided the Bitcoin market became big enough and the risks decreased. Once these 2 things happened, ASIC developments started.

2. Yes there is a choice: do not buy overpriced mining hardware. Wait for prices to decrease. Duh!

3. Prices will decrease by themselves. Just let capitalism do its work. There are so many ASIC companies competing between each other that prices are falling as we speak. Not too long ago the best you could get was 50 Mhash/s per dollar (Avalon ~75 Gh/s at $1500), and now the market is already moving toward 300+ Mhash/s per dollar (Cointerra TM IV 2 Thash/s at $6000 in 2014).

you sound quite naive.  while your intentions may be honourable, you're living in some dream world where commercial and financial reality doesnt exist.

the goal of an asic company is not just to sell enough chips to pay for its NRE.  thats just one of the big up front costs of going into manufacture.  What about the salaries of the engineers who worked for 6+ months to design the chip, will be working x months to ensure it works and continue optimising the design, and presumably will also be working 6+ months on the next generation chip?  or are they all expected to work for free?   What about the sales staff and the support staff ?  the people who answer the phone to help people with orders, or help people with problems getting it running etc?  And what about the return on investment for the investors who put up the money to start the company in the first place?

also, in the timeframes youre talking about, to design a 400-600 GH chip that you havnt even started yet, would take you 6+ months to design it, then 3+ months to manufacture it, so you're already 9 months behind the competition.   In that amount of time, their chips (which have been dropping in line with the rise in difficulty) will already be the price that youre aiming at, obviating the need for you to do this exercise.

by way of an example look at Cointerra (simply because theyre the lowest cost asic (per GH) i know of at present).  they're selling their december systems (not just chips, actual full systems in a box with power supply, controller host, plug and play...) at $7/GH, and their January systems for $3/GH.  By the time we get to may, june.. when your chips might be ready, just imagine what price theyd be selling them for!?   And what about every other asic company thats also competing for the same business.  theyre not in a vacuum.  theyre competing not only with each other, which keeps them honest, but theyre also selling gigahashes at a price that people decide has an roi or they wouldnt sell any, so they have to keep dropping their price in line with network hash increases.   And all of these guys would prefer to be selling chips on their own instead of systems, and im sure the only reason they build systems is because of time to market issues, and if they left it to others to design their boxes, theyd be out in the marketplace later.

part of the problem that youre missing is that its iots the NRE's that are causing the biggest problem.   its the high cost of starting a new asic that creates the issue (and lots of asics compound the problem).  not the actual production cost.  the bitcoin world actually needs LESS new asics, because its the raisning of the cash for the nre that puts such a strain on the bitcoin economy (all the pre-orders, many of which are paid for in bitcoins, which are converted into fiat and then paid directly to the fab, to pay for the nre).   if we didnt have such high nre's, asic companies wouldnt need pre-orders, and the price of bitcoins wouldnt have such price pressure because of high sales of btc into fiat.

youre compounding the problem.  Why not instead, do a deal with knc, hashfast or cointerra to buy the rights to their old 28nm chip when theyve obsoleted it (in the timeframe that your one would be ready anyway) and theyve moved on to 20, 16 or 14nm for their next chips ?

-- Jez

I suggest Rassah as one, if this proves viable and he's available depending on RL commitments and interest.

The other asic vendors will be there long before you. As difficulty shoots up, market value of these chips per TH drops proportionally. It doesnt really matter if thats achieved by these companies mining themselves or selling their gear. The result is the same, in order to maintain sales, market prices will drop and keep dropping until at some point they meet marginal profitability - which btw, IMO is considerably lower than your estimates. If you pay $10K for a processed wafer, you seriously  need to be looking elsewhere, volume prices are ~$4K for  28nm 300mm bulk.

Sorry to correct you, but electricity varies between 1 and 61 us$cents: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Price_comparison

I don't think this list is up-to-date, but relatively equal is incorrect.

What was stopping these "unknown groups" from buying a lot GPUs/FPGAs before ASICs? The goal of this project is to again make electricity a substantial cost for mining. Because electricity is something that is available at a relatively equal price for everyone.

Make a finite batch and have a lottery for each one, make it random distribution for fairness. One persons money then becomes as good as anothers.

Ah, the socialist solution to ASIC!

I'm in, if this isn't just a pipe dream.  But what's to stop unknown groups from buying huge chunks of this proposed new hashing power?  Wouldn't this just be another opportunity for the well-funded profiteers to make even more money?

We are open to suggestions about what steps to take to make our operation more transparent. One option is to put all the "we will do x and y" in the company bylaws and making the Executives/Board personally liable if they fail to honor the commitment.


14nm is still a dream. We will be talking to some companies this week to find out if it is even possible anytime soon. So far we know that we won't probably see 14nm ASICs until 2015.

We will let the community nominate and then vote for the treasurers.

We do not have any particular experience with ASIC design. However, majority of the work will be contracted to companies specializing in this. SHA-256 is not a very complicated algorithm, and designing an ASIC for this is relatively easy. We will also hire experienced people to help us make the right decisions.

Everything will be open-sourced, since it is funded by the community.

Interesting idea!  I'm very fond of the transparency around your NRE expenses and community elected treasurer-group suggestion. A few questions though!

Assuming the 28nm AND 14nm projects prove successful (probably a ways to go on the 14nm) what about smaller chip-architecture?

Any plans for election processes of treasury agents? Length of terms of service?

What kind of background does your company have in ASIC design?  You obviously know what you're talking about, I'm just interested as a miner in your "portfolio".

Pubic domain for the die on the ASIC chips sounds wonderful; do you plan on open-source firmware to run the chips too?

Best of luck and I will certainly be following!

By instructing the fab I understand that this will be your obligation to do so, being specified in a contract of some sort.
You see, trust is very hard to earn and stuff like "we will do x and y" means nothing if it isn't clearly stated in some form of legal binding contract.
I am interested in this project, I think it's fair and good to the community to have access to cheap hardware in order to have a more diverse ecosystem. Right now the markups are huge because there is a huge demand for these  products, they are scarce and everyone, from Avalon to Bitfury, CoinCraft, CoinTerra, CoinWhatever has to make the choice of selling this chip at a higher price or mine for themselves (personally I would mine for myself - too much hassle) yet neither of them, so eager to "help the community" has come up front and said "we will make our chip public domain".

There are kickstarter projects that raised more than 2 million yet we buy custom made hardware because we are looking for the same thing: ROI in 4-5 weeks and a fairly fat profit 6-9 months down the road. Greed is natural. Fortunately, technology limits that.

Also you will only get one shot at this so you know... you have to make it count.

I will be watching this thread.

Well I'm curious to see what happens with this. I like your ideas, now you guys need to get them accomplished. Get there and you have my full support. I know I would love to see a low cost chip hit the market and blow away the competition. It is quite possible to be a loss leader here and lead the market. Plus I really like hobby style boards!

Looking forward to hearing about your team.

This.

There is plenty of competition out there. There are at least 7 companies selling ASIC miners presently. As difficulty goes up, the price of these machines will go way way down.

Within 6 months you'll see devices in the 500+ GH/s range selling for just hundreds of dollars, well within the range of a casual miner. Serious miners will be buying devices in the terahash range.

These devices won't be that profitable but people with cheap or free electricity will be able to make a small proft.

Current ASIC companies are doing not anything immoral (well, except for BFL and Avalon). They are simply charging what the market will bear. That's called capitalism. If you don't agree with their prices, don't buy from them.

1. In Bitcoin mining some laws of regular economy don't hold. For example, there would be NO demand for ASICs, if there were no ASICs anywhere. People were still mining happily with GPUs/FPGAs. ASICs just increased the difficulty rate.
2. They have no other choice, we are here to give one.
3. If you read my post properly, you would find the answer to this question. We are not creating just "another" ASIC. We are creating a low cost ASIC ($100 - $200 for a 400 to 600 GHash/sec capacity chip).
4. Irrelevant question.

A few questions:
So the ASIC companies are evil for selling a product with high market demand?
So the people buying ASIC's by the truckload are not the issue?
And this can be stopped by creating another ASIC?
What drugs are you guys on and can i have some?

I hope this is for real

I'm supportive

Once there is huge consensus that this is a good idea, we will disclose our public profiles. That being said, this proposal is not just for us. Others in the industry are more than welcome to step forward to take lead.


Exactly the reason why we proposed this solution.


14nm is the cutting edge. Only very few companies are making 14nm chips at this time. NRE costs for 14nm are even higher. We are still looking into it. We believe 28nm will still last for an year or so.

I suggest running something on btc.tc or similar

This is a very raw proposal yet. We have not selected any members yet, and will totally rely on the community to do this. We are also open to more suggestions about how we can do this more transparently, and what other steps we should take to ensure that we do not end up like other ASIC manufacturers.

Is there an ASIC on the market which I could order today, that would return as much or more BTC as I would have to pay for it in say under 6mths of mining? I am not sure that there is anymore.

The margins are too high, there is nothing worth buying atm. The ASIC land rush is over until the manufactures start delivering on time, and charging sensible prices.

BTC network just hit 1PH/s and no 28nm gear yet. Wait till that hits, it will be 2,3,..4PH/s in no time.

Activity 1 ?
Am sure this not your first visit to the forums ?

Perhaps you should disclose your previous forum name for credibility.

That aside its a nice idea..

starting with funding for a 28nm design is a little late now, the 28nm rush is happening right away.. I would suggest jumping right into 14nm.   

Interesting.
I will take part for 1 chip, once the 10 eminent members are known.

Yes, its a Delaware corporation. We also own OurAsic.com (there is nothing there yet).

is OurAsic Inc. your actual registered name?  Is it a registered business?

All the ASIC manufacturers are marred with greed, and will continue to suck blood out of the community until the community gets back in control.

ASIC Manufacturer Greed
The reason why the ASIC manufacturers are selling their products for a HIGH margin is, they want to mine themselves. And if they sell for cheap, they will get a lot of competition in mining. A 28nm chip costs at most $100 to manufacture (after the Non Recurring Engineering costs, which are about 1 to 1.5 million dollars). HashFast has already recouped their NRE costs from the sale of their first batch, but they are still selling their chips at 3500% of cost price for the second batch! They can easily make as much profit by selling a lot of chips for a lower price (around ~$200). But they are not doing this. Why? Because, by flooding the market with cheap ASICs, they will not be able to mine on their own. Right now electricity is a negligible cost associated with mining. But if there are a lot of people mining with the latest ASICs, the cost of electricity will once again become significant. Then, these companies will not be able to make much profit from mining.

Delaying a delivery is LEGAL!
In addition to that, they can always delay the delivery of the chips. Deliberately delaying the delivery of a product is NOT a crime, unless specifically ruled as fraud by a court in this special case of Bitcoin mining. Why would a company sell you a money printing machine and deliver it on time when they can delay the delivery and print money in the meantime without breaking any laws?

Getting back in control
Getting back in control is easy. We just have to flood the market wth a lot of cheap ASICs. This is possible (there is a proposal at the end of this post), economically feasible and attainable. How will this help? By flooding the market with cheap ASICs, we can:
1. Foil the evil plan of all the greedy ASIC manufacturers, since mining will no longer be SO MUCH profitable to them. They will have to start making profit from sales only, which will lead to competition and a much fair pricing.
2. Make mining affordable (and attainable) for everyone.
3. Secure the network, by properly decentralizing mining once again.

This will be kind of similar to the "Gentleman's Agreement" proposed by Satoshi in the earlier days of mining.

“We should have a gentleman’s agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network.  It’s much easier to get new users up to speed if they don’t have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility.  It’s nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.” – Satoshi

Right now there is nothing "fair" about mining. The ASIC manufacturers, with millions of investment from the community, are light years ahead of everyone else. For them making the hardware is VERY cheap (~$200 for a complete 500 GHash/s miner using the 28nm technology), the cost of electricity is negligible. For every other Tom, Dick and Harry, the same machine will cost about $5000, and they probably won't get it until March/April next year, when it won't be worth anything.

The big hurdle
Making an ASIC chip is not something that anybody can do at home (unlike using GPUs or FPGAs for mining). There are a lot of upfront costs, known as NRE costs, to the tune of 1 to 2 million dollars. Majority of this investment goes into the ASIC design, and making the "die". The die is used to burn wafers. Once the die is made it can burn an unlimited amount of wafers. A single wafer burn (costing about $10,000) can produce about 150 chips. That comes to about $66 per chip. Packaging/testing of the chip is extra, which is not more than $50 per chip. So, once the NRE costs are collected, each new chip can be produced for about $100.

Solution:
In order to save the network, Bitcoin community has to get back in control. Here is our proposal. Our company will first develop an ASIC chip based on the 28nm technology. And later probably a 14nm one. We will do this 100% transparently by keeping the community in control! How this can be achieved:

• The community will elect 10 eminent members from the Bitcoin community (reputed Escrows, Group buyers) and we will appoint them as "treasurers" of the company. They do not have to US citizens. These treasurers will be in control of all the pre-order funds and will approve every expense.
  
• When the pre-order money for Non Recurring Engineering costs is raised, each treasurer will be in control of 1/10th of the company funds. Whenever there is a bill/invoice to pay, the office bearers of our company will send it to the treasurers for approval. Upon which, each treasurer will transfer 1/10th of the bill amount to the company's account. After making the payment, the company will send back the proof of payment/receipt to each treasurer.
  
• During the whole process the company will have to sign many NDAs, and would not be able to disclose all the invoices/receipts to public. However, since these treasurers will be a part of the company legally, we would be allowed to show the receipts to them.
  
• All the expenses would be disclosed publicly.
  
• Since the biggest cost (and barrier to entry) is the die. We will instruct the fab to release the die to "public domain". That means, any company can place an order from the fab without having to invest in any NREs. This will lead to a healthier competition.
  
• We will not take any salaries, compensations etc., but we will earn a fixed pre-determined small mark-up from the sales as profit.

OurAsic
We are a group of Bitcoin veterans who have invested (and like most others lost a lot) in the ASIC manufacturing companies. OurAsic Inc. is a Delaware corporation. We are located all over the USA, but plan the headquarter the company in Silicon Valley (SF Bay Area, CA). We plan to make a 28nm chip with a capacity of 400 to 600 Ghash/sec (we will get better estimates of the actual value when we start the process, but we are 99% confident that it will be in this range). We will sell the first batch of 10,000 chips at $200/chip to collect 2 million dollars. As proposed above, the money will remain in control of the treasurers. Once the NRE money is collected, it will take us about 4 to 5 months to ship the chips to the customers. (2 months for designing the chip, simulations, etc. and 2-3 months for the tape-out, burning, testing, packaging, etc.) If we start today, we can have the chips in our hands by late January. During this time, we will release the chip specs, sample circuit schematics, Gerbers, BOMs etc. so that OEMs can start designing/manufacturing their units. The subsequent batches will be even cheaper at about ~$100/chip (fabs give huge discounts for large quantities).

PLEASE NOTE:
Lets please keep the discussion on this topic limited to whether this is feasible and to gauge the interest of the community in such a project. We will start another thread to discuss our ability/legitimacy, and to introduce our team.