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They finally launched it, seems genuine ? http://asicminer.net/?p=58 .. i am tempted to risk those BTC

Considering how little it costs to manufacture something in China, I'm guessing those guys are going to turn a serious profit.  If it's a scam, I suppose the profit turned will be even larger.

While their claims are plausible, I would be very concerned that this is a scam.

If they're reading this, I have an offer for them: If they're willing to accept my written promise not to disclose any information they tell me, I'm willing to validate their claims. They wouldn't have to send me any hardware. They would simply have to answer technical questions that I pose within a tight time frame (24 hours or so) -- they would all be questions they would necessarily already have the answer to if this was real. I will make my conclusions public, either way.

I like the part about not being able to manufacture, because the weather is too hot 

I still don't think a team of four could, in a few months:
1. develop an ASIC
2. develop a controller
3. also make the custom software, interface, etc...

Congratulations, you just won 150.000 dollars within our lottery.
Before you can claim your award, please deposit 250 dollars to the following bank account:  9494949.
After the transaction is confirmend we will send you the whole total of 150.000 dollars to your bank account.

Keep in mind you are randomly selected out of 30596930 people!

Sincerely,
asicminer.net

lol

Well don't worry guys. You know some fool with too many bitcoins is gonna give it a shot and find out for us whether it's a scam or not

Also just noticed that PRC is now the Popular Republic of China, fyi

It gets even better if you noticed:
So Bitcoins are illegal there and that's why they don't want to run the miners themselves, but you need to pay them Bitcoins in order to reserve one. Right.

That whole site smells too good to be true  ::)

I wonder if they are just going for the 15 BTC scam, or whether they will also try for the additional $2700. But it's fun to think about mining at 5 Gh/s and only pulling 400 watts or so from the wall.  ;D

A very valid point, especially considering that such enterprising individuals could pay someone else in BTC to rent some rackspace and run the things if they're actually going to dabble with the currency, but don't want to get caught mining in their country.

It makes sense if you don't think about it.

Hi guys,

We are sorry to see such an harsh response from the community. We wish to reply all of your questions to clarify any matter and in the meantime we also updated our blog post, feel free to check it out. This is not intended to be a scam, we are very concerned about releasing pictures or schematics because of the reverse engineering risk.
By the way 'Popular republic of china' was a typo, perhaps a bad one. We've fixed that. Thanks

The reverse engineering risk doesn't exist. After your first unit is deployed, it's open season. I would think it's better to go for complete disclosure, thereby gaining the trust and commerce of dozens or hundreds than to appear shady and turn away thousands.

Show me what you got and I'll pay you fairly for it.
If you want a down payment on your promises, find some other sucker.

lol

Just a note...

http://who.godaddy.com/whois.aspx?domain=asicminer.net&prog_id=GoDaddy

We will use epoxy coating sprayed onto the main channels and components. Removing it will destroy the hardware.

Personally, the only reason that it looks too good to be true is that the English is the best I've seen from a PRC native... and I communicate with quite a few due to my work.

Plus the fact none of my manufacturers in Shenzhen have warned me they are shutting down factories for vacation because it's too hot, especially since weather records indicate they are just generally only 1C hotter than where I am  ;)

So we won't be able to see anything under this coating, but you still won't show a prototype? You really don't make much sense. Anything that the eyes can distinguish is trivial. It's the structure inside the ASIC that would be interesting. And it would take X-rays to see that.

Besides, there are ways of getting that epoxy sh*t off. I've heard a cappucino machine works well.

We said that we are foreigners since that start. That was meaning we are not a chinese team, we do work closely with chinese people.
We never intended that factories are shutting down for the hotness, but simply 'cause august is approaching and some of them will take vacation in august, if you work in the industry and you are in China you should know that.

The prototype obviously isn't coated because it is still needed at it stands at this stage.
We will manage to show some screenshots of the control software in action.

It doesn't take a lot to cook up a convincing looking UI without any actual hardware. USD 2700 isn't that small a sum after all so you'll need to provide a lot more evidence than that.

Why? The only thing that matters is the ASIC. What does it matter if people copy your other hardware if they still need your ASIC to make it work? And the hardest part of the ASIC, the mining itself, already has an FPGA design freely available. It would be more work to reverse engineer your work than to do it from scratch.

Fascinating.  I figured it would only be  a matter of time, who would have thought china would step up.....

Not like they are beating the US in production, manufacturing, owning all rare earth metal mines, and building a space station bigger then the ISS solo.

Good thing china is a 3rd world commie country, right republicans?

We will use Paypal for the final payment, you are risking 5 BTC.

The coating is on the ASIC itself, the control unit does not matter much, you are right.

If this isn't the most complex bitcoin scam I've seen yet...

1) Did they use the existing verilog? Will the original authors be compensated?

2) This nonsense about epoxying the board seems utter nonsense. One only does that when tampering is a security concern, in this case even the completely uninitiated understand this is not an intellectual property issue. The biggest cost of an ASIC are one-time engineering costs, this is NOT something you can gather by looking at components.

3) Wonder how hard it is to make a nice looking "control software"? Check out fakeminer.

Good luck, if this is a scam I'm sure they've already recouped all of their upfront costs!

so why is the website hosted in France ?? (and a crap looking one at that)

Are you sure you know what an ASIC is? It wouldn't be hard at all to post a picture but blurr out the interesting parts.

I've said enough against you for one day. Sorry about that. I think you should take JoelKatz up on his offer to ask you a few questions.

You must not know that it is possible to reverse engineer a pcb board only from a picture, and even a complex one. Determined people could definitely do that. All of the VHDL & Verilog code has been written partially by us and partially by the team we work with.

What would you get from a blurred picture? i tell you, nothing. It is only something your mind is asking you to do, you want have a visual proof this is real, it is understandable. Our ASIC sports a very compact design and components&channels are very visible on the board.

why does it matter ? the domain was purchased with BTC from exoware.net

Basically what we're saying is, "We're willing to be scammed. But you need to work a little harder at it."   ::)

I have an idea , why don't you solve a block with your hardware.

 Should take about 20 minutes with your 5 GH. You need to tell us the bitcoin address first. Then solve a block in a reasonable time  consistent with 5 GH and post the transaction hash of the solve so we can verify the address is the one you said it is.

That's real. simple. Solve a damn block or STFU.

The average time to generate a block at 5000000 Khps, given current difficulty of 1564057.4508376 , is 2 weeks, 1 day, 13 hours, 11 minutes, and 55 seconds  ::)

We will see what we can do about this.

Smells fishy. PRC is the People's Republic of China. Not Popular...WTF. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Republic_of_China (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People's_Republic_of_China) you didnt spend 5 mins to google that sh*t??

we already addressed that, it was a typo. stop trolling

Oooh... your right my bad... either way according to the link he has enough units to solve a block in a reasonable amount of time.

He doesn't. There are solo miners with more GHash than he does.
According to his blog, he's got one single prototype, which may do up to 5GHash with all 10 cards or maybe he's only got one/two prototype cards and so only can do 500Mhash/s

What he's asking for is payment to PREORDER the machines, in order words, they aren't made yet and will only be delivered around August. Which might be long enough to make impossible to get back any money paid in anyway.

That's still money and you're not even willing to show us a picture of the prototype and the card. And since AFAIK, an ASIC is a chip, it's impossible to tell what customization you did to it purely by looking at a picture of the physical machine and cards.

Related? http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=26973.0 (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=26973.0) more specifically

Anyways I'm actually in China on vacation right now with nothing to do. I think I can fit in a trip to Guangzhou before I leave. Unless this is too secret for me to view of course.

I am a Free (as in freedom) and open source software fanatic. I will be using FPGAs if all the ASIC modules are literally epoxied black boxes. What are you trying to hide? Will I be able to write my own miner to make use of the chips?

Note: I don't like FPGAs that much either due to the lack of documentation.

why not accept paypal for the initial reservation payments instead of a non reversible method like btc. or set up an group buy escrow if that exists.

The site offers no proof whatsoever, and just attempts to pass itself as credible by posting claims of performance. Or promises of providing proof.

Consider Artforz who made his own ASIC miner - he had no problems sharing quite a few technical details about his design. Nobody managed to replicate his results because of the huge initial investment required.

Epoxy on chips for preventing reverse engineering? There are sites on the net where you mail them your ASIC, and they will sand it down layer by layer taking pictures at high magnification.

Only thing to be hidden here is that the mythical ASIC doesn't exist. I would say that this is an elaborate scam attempt. Even if just a few people fall for it, it will still have paid off. Expect delays, stories of "Paypal problems", requests for additional money wires.

Now, after that "stop trolling" reply you better leave the sock puppet account and use your real one.
You really sound like you are used to be around here lol

<troll>
BTW, you really should be more professional in your scam, because the wordpress post ID's shows that you guys try a lot of times to write the perfect scam post for every published post, but being lazy/dumb as you are you had to trash the posts instead of saving them as a draft and edit them :D

And damn, couldn't you find a wordpress theme more recent than 2008?  :o and a lame one  ;)
</troll>

I am on the fence about this product. I have been following since their first blog post and was surprised (wary) of the speed that they have accomplished these things.

I've done business in China and can understand their IP concerns. It is ruthless over there. At the same time, I do not think that guarded approach sells in this community and they need to find a way to deal with that. There must be some pictures they can take which do not show the entire board.  If they can turn this around in 3 weeks time, they still have first mover's advantage since it takes much longer to copy cat this sort of thing.

I was skeptical of their payment method (obviously) and am impressed that they switched to a smaller deposit + paypal.  Its a tough crowd to please. If they had asked for paypal upfront we would have cried bloody murder and asked them why they wouldn't take payment in bitcoins, etc. 

Ultimately, I do not have $2,700 to risk on this project.  I would risk $270 on it easily and maybe up to $1,000.  I'm sure someone will and we'll all find out that either its a scam or that we got into it too late.

Good luck everyone.

Asicminer, you have two choices:

1. Insist on payment being made "on faith", and get few if any sales, or

2. Lend an evaluation unit to someone trustworthy in the community, and when they confirm your specifications you will sell all of your stock very quickly.

Your call.

This. If you get someone like JoelKatz on your side you will sell all of your units incredibly quickly.

If you don't then you aren't going to sell very much at all.

In theory that's achievable with FPGAs right now, it's just not cost effective because of the huge up-front cost of the FPGAs.

JoelKatz's offer still seems like the easiest way to build more trust. Legally binding non-disclosure agreement forms are freely available on the web, and I'm sure there are forms that can be filled out and signed electronically. What could be easier than that?

NDA could be and had been ignored in some cases. But given that Joel has his face there, and if I'm not mistaken, him being the same JoelKatz active in other projects, I don't think he would want to his name and reputation just to steal a machine. So asicminer really has no reason to fear letting Joel Katz know just a bit of information, unless he knows there isn't a working prototype of any sorts.

Right, and JoelKatz is only asking to verify information that he *already* knows and which is entirely public at this point. If there is anything about this asic machine that is truly a secret, it probably doesn't need to be disclosed in the exchange. He is merely asking to confirm that this group has the relevant know-how to manufacture such a machine (or even build a prototype). If this isn't a scam, his offer is really a no-brainer to help verify its legitimacy, and skepticism is warranted so long as they don't take him up on it (or offer some suitable alternative). It's a little hard to believe that asicminer didn't forsee the skeptical reaction. We are expected to hand over $3k on the basis of a website with very sketchy details? Really?   

if these ASIC machines are real it would be very interesting. but why take down payment in BTC? why can't you take it in paypal or a more reliable type of payment? pictures of this prototype would mean a lot, and you can't reverse engineer everything from just pictures, especially with 10 boards stacked on each other.

That's not quite true. I would be asking them questions whose answer I know within a range but don't know for sure.

That is essentially correct. There are certain thing you have to do in the process of designing, building, and testing an ASIC. The questions I would ask would be things they would definitely know. An example question might be "how many gates or equivalent does the ASIC have?" Or "what is the die size?"

Now, I don't know how many gates their ASIC has, but I can calculate how many it would have based on other information (such as the number of hashes and the clock speed). I can then check my gate count against theirs. Similarly, I can calculate the die size based on other information and check its consistency.

The value of their project is almost entirely in the fact that they have (assuming they're telling the truth) actually made masks and spun up a production process. The design is not secret -- we all know how it would be done. That is assuming their design is based on the FPGA miner. My first question would be to ensure we're on the same page as far as what I'm assuming about their design.

This guy is way out in left field. At first he replied to me

Since then it's been edited to say "compact design". Either way, if he knew what an ASIC was, he wouldn't have said that

Well, I could answer the Paypal question... for the same reason we don't normally accept Paypal for purchasing Bitcoin. If the machine was real, just imagine after they send a US$2.7K machine out and the guy disputes the charge "Goods not delivered" or "Product does not perform as claimed (4.8GHs per 300W instead of 5GHs per 300W)" :D

Physical goods dont have the paypal problem that virtual goods do. They simply dont. If he has a delivery confirmation than paypal will tell the customer to f-off.

So the buyer could not even raise a dispute about product not fit for purpose or does not fit description?

He could raise a dispute, which will result in the buyer having to send the item back to the seller for a refund.

So what? What makes your project different and valuable (assuming you're telling the truth) is one and only one thing -- you actually have an ASIC. The design of the circuit board is incredibly minimal. The design of the software is incredibly minimal. Even the design of the ASIC itself is only of moderate value because the hard work has already been done -- the community already has a 'one double-hash per clock' design for an ASIC/FPGA miner. The one thing the community does not have is an actual physical ASIC and the final ASIC design (which would largely be specific to the particular process technology and vendor chosen anyway).

A competitor who stole your software and PCB design would reduce their project effort by maybe 2%. Maybe. Someone who is fronting over a million dollars to get an ASIC out wouldn't even bother to do that because it's not worth the copyright headache for a project that is completely legal and requires significant investment.

Since they were online like an hour ago, but haven't posted since last night, that probably isn't a good sign either.

Considering the ease in which this could be cleared up, I really can't come to any conclusion other than that this is a scam.

If more info ends up coming forward, I will gladly revisit this statement though.

Skepticism is great, but give them a chance to prove thmeselves. They took our initial concerns into consideration and lowered the upfront payment and changed the payment method from a wire payment to Paypal.  Not to say that Paypal is perfect for this transaction, but its a huge step up from a bank transfer.

Just look at this post, and tell me if it makes any sense at all: http://asicminer.net/?p=43

I have no idea what he is saying, but all I can conclude is that they think there is a somewhat effective attack on SHA256???

And not only that, if it doesn't find a solution in some time it releases the block on a mining pool and starts on a new block?!?!? What are the miners doing in the meantime??? Working on a stale block??? Plus you cannot pull a block from thin air.

At worst, this is a complete scam. At best, these guys have no idea how the protocol works... or something is seriously being lost in translation.

That post is confused and meaningless. It was either posted by someone who doesn't understand the fundamentals of how mining works or it's the result of a serious language barrier. To me, and this is just my opinion, it reads like the kind of confused impressive-sounding text you often see in investment scams such as "run an engine on water" or "100 mile per hour car" scams.

"the whole hash space is scanned at very fast rates and at random multiple ranges, multiple times"

That could potentially mean that it tries all possible nonces for each of many arbitrary coinbases. (Being very charitable.)


"If within a given n period of time the solution is not found, and the bitcoin bounty not awarded, the block will be shared on a mining pool."
"Biggest part of the cluster power will continue to download and work on new blocks, repeating the first operations, while the remaining power will be used to continue the mining pool effort"

That could mean that it's partitionable between pooled and solo mining. (Being very charitable.)

Completely unrelated but thanks for asking

The difficult bit is... I so want this to be true....
:)

I do too! And in my mind it seems like these guys know what they are talking about when it comes to the hardware side of things, so they could technically have had the expertise to make it happen (though I am the opposite of an expert on this stuff, so it wouldn't take much to make me think that).

We will not send hardware unit for testing, sorry. Tomorrow we will publish some blurred pictures of the ASIC board and screenshots of tools we developed. We hope that will be enough for people to understand this is a serious project.
As per the technical information requested, our asic has 45K logical gates and gathers 500 Mhash\sec at 120MHz and one cycle per full-hash. Honestly the feedback from the community has discouraged us a bit about taking the risk to invest money in this venture. But today we got some emails from people interested in financing the whole operation for using the machines as a bitcoin mining cluster. We will keep you updated.

Those are very rough approximations really, i think you are well aware of this.


We used fpga miner as a starting base to develop our design. When we said it is 'compact' we meant it fits into 45K gates.

hello asicminer
we would like to know if your offer is avalable for a 19" rack
with rj45 connector ?

Hi,

Sorry, i don't get what you are really asking me, do you want a 19" rack of multiple machines? by the way, why the rj45 connector?

Thanks

well yes how many machines fits to a 19" rack, and gonna be there a way to access the machine by ip or just usb?

Well you mean access the workstation that controls the machines. I don't really know how many machines takes to fit a full 19" rack.
We will publish size specifications along with some pictures during today or tomorrow.

Well, you should go with whatever decision makes the most sense for your venture. But I find it very surprising that someone would offer you financing without wanting an even higher level of verification than we are asking for. And since you are so discouraged by our requests for more information, I would think that you will be similarly discouraged when these people offering to finance you ask for verification that this operation isn't a hoax. For what its worth, your efforts in this thread to address questions, and some of the changes made to your web page, do build a little more credibility IMO, but not enough yet to pull the trigger. Overall, the feedback you are getting is not dismissive, we just want more information. So I don't you should be discouraged; it was just unrealistic to think you could put up a web page with some sketchy information and have the orders flood in.  

We received an offer from some chinese entrepreneurs. The fact that we manufacture in Guangzhou is not safe for us. Trade secret in China is non-existent, as well as respect for intellectual property. We will not reveal further details about the offers we receive. We did not expect orders to flood in but at least we did expect that the community would take this seriously.

It's hard to take this seriously when you release so little information, and won't do anything with a 3rd party to somewhat verify that your claims are true.  Usually when things are too good to be true, they are... so everyone is being cautious.

Well, the second any respected member of the community receives a working copy, the orders will flood in.

The irony is that, if you really have the machine, by being so secretive about it, it would take you longer to find buyers. The longer it takes, the higher the chance that the Chinese factories you're working with, would start selling copies of the ASIC/machine if they believe there is a demand for it.

Like others have said, if an established member with the right knowledge can verify your claims, you will sell those 500 machines really really fast. There won't therefore be time for anybody to clone it.

asicminer,

It sounds like your trade secrets, if you really have any, would be far safer with JoelKatz than they are with the Chinese manufacturer you are working with. Since the cat is already out of the bag with the manufacturer, I don't see how you are taking further risk by having the requested conversation with JoelKatz. Obviously I don't fully understand the situation, but going on what I know (or think I know), your actions seem a bit irrational.

Also, I'm wondering - are you in this purely for the profit? Or do you also value the long term viability of bitcoin as a decentralized form of currency? If the latter, I would think that being bought out by a group who plans to use your technology to set up a private mining cluster would be less attractive to you than making the technology publicly available. I realize that given the skeptical reaction on this board, you now have doubts that you can make a profit by selling your machines on the open market, but as others have already pointed out, if you can just work with us to give more verification, the orders will come.

The "45k logical gates" that he quoted sounds low to me by a factor of 7. I would expect about 300-400k logic elements to get 500 Mhash/s. But, seriously, thanks for providing a concrete number for us to look at.

Maybe you can answer this question: How do you provide DC power to the ASIC? Anybody could find a solution to this easily on digikey.com in 10 minutes, so you shouldn't mind releasing a bit of info. Just describe the parts as best you can if you won't give us part numbers.

I'll give you an example:
On my first FPGA prototype, I used an AC/DC plug-in adapter to convert the 110V 60Hz wall power to 3.3Vdc at the board. Then I used (2) LDO's to convert 3.3V to 1.2V.

This reeks of a scam.

The fact that they have not complied with JoelKatz simple request of "asking questions" makes me believe it is 100% Bullshit.

Do not put your money into this project. I am not doing so.

They haven't even posted the blurry pics promised yesterday, though this could be due to having a buy-out offer if that claim had any truth to it.

Lol. Right. Because all of us are more than skeptical, somebody has surely approached them with a multi-million dollar buy offer.

Hmmh, having personally been in Kowloon (Nathan Road is the main road on the Kowloon part of Hong Kong), I was just wondering why someone would live in Kowloon and call his company Shenzhen electronics whatsoever.

Would be a lot cheaper to live in the PRC side instead of HK, no? On the other hand, Kowloon is a lovely place. :)

*sigh* I have better things to do with my time than deal with this.  :-\

My personal opinion:
Nothing indicates to me this is real. Until further notice, I do not advice purchasing this product.

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If you used the Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Mining project (https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner) as your starting base, I am making you publicly legally aware that that project is covered entirely by the terms of the GNU General Public License (https://github.com/progranism/Open-Source-FPGA-Bitcoin-Miner/blob/master/LICENSE.txt). By using any part of the Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Mining project, you must conform to the legal obligations set forth in the GNU GPL. If you do not conform to the legal obligations set forth in the GNU GPL, you will be prosecuted in all applicable legal jurisdictions.
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SHA-256, by its very nature, cannot be optimized.⁽¹⁾ The Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner uses 75K Altera Logic Elements to perform a full Bitcoin hash per clock cycle. This translates to somewhere between 225K gates and 975K gates. You say you get ~4 Bitcoin hashes per clock cycle from 45K gates. This is massively incorrect on your part.

(1) For curious parties, SHA-256 itself cannot be optimized. Optimization of SHA-256 is akin to an attack on the algorithm itself. You can, however, provide application specific implementations that exploit constant data in various ways. This applies to Bitcoin, as it does have some constant data fed into the hashing function, but only to a limited extent. The 75K Logic Elements figure I quoted above is already taking advantage of a good majority of these optimizations.

Was going point out there was no easy way to get the original text for hash verification¹. Then I saw the unmutilated text quoted for my reply...

1: The board translates those [url] tags into HTML anchors.

From my work experience, it's not uncommon for companies to have their sales/admin office in HK and/or Taiwan but factories in Shenzhen and named in a variety of "illogical" ways. So that alone isn't damning evidence.

But getting publicly pwnz by fpgaminer however... :D

Yeah, agreed. Even though I have no experience with ASIC design whatsoever, it's pretty obvious that 45K gates isn't nearly enough even for just the adders of a 1 hash per cycle design, let alone the rest of the logic required.

This is a scam, you are guaranteed to lose your money.

fpgaminer's post basically summed up and closed the discussion, and we are doing the scammers a favor by keeping this thread alive.

I suggest that this thread is closed and buried until somebody comes clean with some proof.

fpgaminer and what about shipping costs to Europe/US and customs taxes?

Interesting concept, but just a tad outside of my gambling price range.

The reason that people are so sceptical is because very little information is forthcoming. We understand that you want to protect your IP, but you won't get sales that way. You have to meet us half way and at the moment you are more secretive than North Koreas nuclear plans! Even I would be happy to purchase this, but its a big risk based on nothing substantial at the moment.

You also promised photos today - which have not turned up - hardly a convincing sign! I hope when they do turn up that they wont be Mr BlurryCam types!

Hi Everyone,

Interesting thread. Without making a judgement on asicminer, I wanted to let you know about LargeCoin if you aren't already aware of it. This is a new company I have founded with some computer engineering colleagues (both of whom have worked previously with a major semiconductor firm with a combined 25 years of experience in ASICs). We are not asking for deposits and won't make claims about performance until the chips are baked and tested. However, if you want to sign up for a low volume announcement mailing list, feel free to fill in a form at the following URL:

http://largecoin.com

A few facts about LargeCoin:

1. The founding team have a computer engineering background, with relevant experience in ASIC design and marketing with one of the leading semiconductor companies. The CEO has run two technology companies previous to LargeCoin and has experience raising private equity financing.

2. Our web site is not yet up, so don't bother checking largecoin.com - it's just an Apache default page.


3. The company's R&D is happening in Canada and we will likely remain incorporated in Canada. When the web site is up, we'll provide incorporation details for you to scrutinize if you wish.

4. We're working hard to release a Bitcoin mining appliance as fast as we can. The appliance will be optimized for spatial density and of course the ASIC will provide power efficiency. We are not taking deposits for appliances at this time and don't plan to. We are privately funded and don't expect customers to take on risk.

5. As the computational power of the Bitcoin network increases, we feel it's more important to optimize for spatial density and power efficiency than it is to provide the lowest possible cost per GHash/s. This means our appliances may be more costly on a GHash/s basis than GPUs; however, when you account for power and rackspace they will be substantially less expensive.

6. There is no release date yet - sorry about that. If you sign up for our announcement list, we'll let you know as soon as we have a ship date.

The only thing I wish for is to compress time so that we can get these things out to you all faster. But ASICs take time and there is a lot of uncertainty along the way that could stretch or compress our schedule.

Why is there no actual name associated with your domain name registration?

That is a sure way to get your domain name revoked.

Those claims sound funny to me.

Same dollars for a bit more Mh/s, on way less watts. It's the way less watts that sounds funny to me.

I guess we'll see. If its true, GPU mining follows CPU mining into history in a few months!

Bonus history lesson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dreadnought_(1906) (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dreadnought_(1906))
With this single act, the British undermined themselves. Obliterating their navel advantage at the time by making the existing fleet obsolescent. The problem wasn't the ability to build a complete new fleet, but the financial resource need to do it!

Thanks for pointing this out. We'll correct this with the domain registration.

The only fishy thing about the power consumption figures I've seen for asicminer.net is that they're a bit high, if anything; you can get that kind of MHash/W with FPGAs in theory. It's all the other details of asicminer.net that scream scam.

To be honest i sended 5 btc to this guy, and today i got an answer.

Funny,

This guy doesn't sound chinese at all, the site is hosted from the uk and yet the website is talking about "here in Shenzhen".
I don't trust it .. at all.

Man, sorry to hear that. Is it about time to blacklist asicminer and contact BBB?

We are trying since the very moment we noticed your transfer to email you. This is what we're getting back :

This is the mail system at host pop-pri-02.datacomm.ch.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not
be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can
delete your own text from the attached returned message.

                   The mail system

<email address redacted>: maildir delivery failed: //PRI-02// Sorry, the user's
    mailbox is full, try again later.

Do you have another mailbox or do you mind to clear-up your inbox ?

Sorry everybody for not having replied before.Blog updated at http://asicminer.net/?p=78 (http://asicminer.net/?p=78) with some details and a picture. We will be back in a few hours for extended discussion.

At least more information is released but still not enough to justify the risk. Wish u posted a video or some more evidence which proves that you actually have a working prototype to the community.

Yes, and I wish that instead of interpreting the reaction of this board as "harsh" (as you state on your web site), you would realize that we are requesting more information so that we can do business with you based on something other than blind trust. Given your insistence on near absolute secrecy so far, you are essentially placing almost no trust in us, yet expecting blind trust in return. I don't see how this venture of yours is going to get off the ground without at least meeting your potential customers half-way on the trust issue.

Also, while your were busy, a serious question was raised in this thread about how you can possibly do what you claim with only 45k gates, and this will need to be addressed in some fashion.

Since this is being made in China, I'll wait for the manufacturer to release their own pirated versions which cost 10x less.  The first wave of buyers take on the scam risk, as well as pay an early adopter tax. 

You can't pirate hardware, noob.

Again, it's pretty simple. Prove to a respected member of the community that you have something, then you will sell as many as you make in hours. Don't and you won't sell anything.

You'd be surprised at just how well the Chinese can pirate (read: clone) hardware:
http://www.popsci.com/iclone (http://www.popsci.com/iclone)

The blog post in question: http://asicminer.net/?p=78  (screenshot in case of later tampering: https://i.imgur.com/mv5fU.png )

Here is a full-scale version of the claimed "prototype ASIC board":
https://i.imgur.com/ViX4b.jpg

From asicminers comment section I find this comment (screenshot in case the comment will be deleted):
https://i.imgur.com/0SWWG.png

According to that comment the following linked image shows the insides of a generic mass-produced tablet, with its SODIMM CPU module visible in the middle:
https://i.imgur.com/zYnue.jpg

---
So the "prototype ASIC board" asicminer tries to show off, is in every non-obscured area identical to a common CPU module.

IMO, scam.

ROFL good luck to all those that pre-order. Very little information and a crappy picture that claims to be the asic board and now someone else proves that picture to be a component from a tablet.

i would agree with comment from http://asicminer.net/?p=78
"Good call Yotta, in conjunction with this, the fact that prototypes don’t use surface mount ICs is a dead giveaway"

anybody else having worked with pcb design give this a mention and save people some disappointment  >:(

https://i.imgur.com/e1ud2.jpg

Just some generic card

See here http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ixqrw/asic_miner_a_dedicated_bitcoin_mining_device/ (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ixqrw/asic_miner_a_dedicated_bitcoin_mining_device/)

We're online now. This tablet is assembled here in shenzhen, the cpu you are looking at is the VIA8505 and we used a similar raw pcb platform available cheaply here.

I'll buy one if you reply to fpgaminer's post.

^^this.

as attracted as we all are to what will happen with ASICs, asicminer, you are walking and quacking like a duck...

You should go full disclosure on us right now. Let people copy this, big deal. I would rather pay $2700 right now versus paying $1400 for some clone a month from now.

yes.

asciminer
well you can contact me here in the forum aswell. I wrote you here twice no answer. But to make it more easy, write me on coinmaster ad tenobis.com


Tenobis

In China they even do this. Must see with your eyes.

Hi, thanks for your patience, we have just sent the original email.

I'm not kidding man. There's a lot of money sitting here right now. I don't think you appreciate how liquid your device really is.

Ill just leave this here:
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ixqrw/asic_miner_a_dedicated_bitcoin_mining_device/c27ib22
And
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ixqrw/asic_miner_a_dedicated_bitcoin_mining_device/c27ifpv

 :-\

There are already SHA-256 cores for sale.
http://www.cast-inc.com/ip-cores/encryption/sha-256/
http://www.heliontech.com/downloads/fast_hash_asic_datasheet.pdf
This guys is acting like there is some huge secret to keep. Give me a break. I'm calling bullshit.

Read the discussion. There are many points you are not getting.

Those are totally different stuffs. 

I've read the discussion, you & your 'product' got eaten alive.

Just because our product shares a pcb platform that is more than common in the tablet manufacturing scene it does not mean it is a scam. Our secretive acting is dictated by the fact that it is more than simple to assemble a device like this given the right connections.
Probably in the next few days somebody will setup a subreddit dedicated to asking general questions about our device. We will try to fix things then.

Read the discussion. There is only one key point and you're the only one not getting it. ;)

It does smell like a scam if the supposed company with the technical expertise to build such a PCB can tell people they are using the same Flash chip as another device... then somebody points out the part number on the "Flash" chip indicates that it's something else actually ;)

a flash chip or a sdram in this specific case would have the same purpose.

Really? What's the purpose of the flash chip / sdram in this specific case then?

Yet it was like pulling chicken's teeth to get them to post a blurred picture indicating nothing more than this common format.

The purpose is storing constants used in the computational tasks and save logic space for other uses.

                                                         
Use of Block RAM (BRAM) for storage of constants [8]. Reconfigurable hardware devices
such as FPGAs often have on-board memories which can be pre-loaded.
Storing the Kt constants in these memories frees up space in the device
which can then be used to implement extra logic. The free space also leads to
improved routing and, thus, a general speed-up in circuit operation.
                                                         
From "Optimisation of the SHA-2 Family of Hash Functions on FPGAs"
Robert P. McEvoy, Francis M. Crowe, Colin C. Murphy and William P. Marnane
             Department of Electrical & Electronic Engineering,
                      University College Cork, Ireland
             {robertmce, francisc, cmurphy, liam}@rennes.ucc.ie

Some one posted the below GIF image in this post.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ixqrw/asic_miner_a_dedicated_bitcoin_mining_device/c27ifpv

https://i.imgur.com/Cchli.gif

oic, since it's only for storage purposes, it isn't really a critical part. So which Flash chip are you using?

This asicminer charade makes for some damn entertaining drama!  8)

http://www.spankthellama.com/hashbrowns/main.php/d/2958-1/micheal+jackson+eating+popcorn+theater+gif.gif

Haha, he has not really answered some of my questions on reddit. This is too funny. He wont even provide evidence his "company" exists. in another reddit post he says

"I will tell you something of value:
It's undoubtful that some people nailed some important points, but the community did not call this unanimously a scam, before your crazy intervention we were trying to setup a separate discussion for some question asking. Now i understand you think i am a scammer but I either don't know who are you and who entitled you to speak for the community, and from what i see, you are not the kind of person that surely should take the lead in this kind of situations. Put away your ego, go to bed and sleep on this.Try not to be rude when answering to this msg. Going away now.back in some hours."

he goes on to say "If the community wants us to just change direction and completely stop providing updates just let us know. We will be back later this evening ( in China ) and checkout new comments."

Half the time he cant even make up his mind if its ASIC or fpga. Won't provide the sha core datasheet, claims the ram, sha core, and fpga (or asic) are on a single sdram board that connects to a master board. Anyone notice that as soon as he gets put into a corner he uses the "going away, brb later" line? i saw him do it a mere 5 minutes of answering a guys question on reddit, when he had already been away for 5 hours.

This guy, without a doubt, is a scam, and appearently isn't aware that people from bitcoin forums and reddit tend to surf both forums.

If your gonna scam, know who your target audience is.

edit: he also has bots or is using dummy accounts to get his -24 comment karma out of the hole. its up to -16 now but no one has posted anything new in either of his threads, neither has he replied to anything

Yeah, this looks identical, which means that the cpu is an ARM RISC design cpu and not an ASIC or FPGA.

It's incredible how much avoiding is done on the part of asicminer when any design has parts that can identify it without giving away important facts.
He could have, for instance, specified the ASIC part that he used.
Without the hashing algo it would be useless and any manufacturer would know of these processors anyway so nothing is lost.
And he's being secritive about a commonly used design, WTF?

I mean, why not show a blurred picture of the ASIC boards or the custom interconnects he talks about?

I'm still not convinced that this is not a scam, i'm afraid.

Well finaly i got a confirmation Email that the 5 BTC was recived by ASICMINER.
So i gonna try this out, cause of the trouble here in the forum i just preordered one controller with one asic board.

Im ready to invest this money to proove it wrong or right. and as soon i get any usefull results i will post them here in the forum.

To the all the guys who dnt trust this situation, well we will know when the first devices are shipped and ppl try it out. Till then this discussion about scam or not is not realy usefull.

Like i said i give Asicminer a chance to proove his claims right. Otherwise we have allready an alternative with the Altera Cyclon IV chip ;)
http://mine.tenobis.com/images/AlteraCyclone.jpg
So if all this from china prooves wrong we from TENOBIS still will be able to provide the comunity at least an FPGA Miner with Swiss guarantee.

Regards

Openrune

P.S. We accept BTC :)

how much did asic miner cost you with this configuration?
250 + 150 ? what about shipping, taxes etc?

All of us wating for your tests! maybe this isnt a scam

I think this smells like scam, I can't find the google page right now, but some of that last press releases was pretty much lifted from a textbook talking about a SHA core implementation based on a Pilchard design - or mebe that was the Pilchard design.  Even the things like polling communication.  If it helps anyone, I was googling for Pilchard, and I ended up on a google books page, but after reading the section that came up, it literally was almost word for word the same as their latest news description.

On the other hand.  There are "ASIC"s out there that are literally just stripped down FPGAs.  For example, you can design something on a Xilinx FPGA, and then you once your design is set in stone, you can actually send it off to Xilinx to make "ASIC"s from that FPGA design.  It's basically just a FPGA without the FP ( Field Programmable Gate Array => Gate Array ).  And it's not as cheap as a real ASIC, but it's definitely cheaper than an FPGA - per unit price.  Xilinx also expects volumes in the thousands if not millions to even provide the service.  But I could see cheaper Chinese companies doing this type of thing.  So I don't think it's out of this world to think that it's not an "ASIC" in this term of the definition.

Now back again to the scam side.  480-500 MHash/s just sounds unfathomable for what I just described above.  To obtain these types of hash rates you would need either multiple SHA cores running in parallel ( AND pipelined, i just don't see enough cores getting packed in ), or one core running at extrememly fast clock rates.  I just don't see either of these happening in an FPGA type ASIC.  I would expect maybe something on the order of 100-300 MHash.  As said earlier, you can't really do much to optimize the math/logic that goes on in the alogirhtm.

I also find it funny that they think using some sort of external memory could possibly be faster than using the on-chip BRAMs.  Or if they are using the internal BRAMs, then how they could possibly think that doing something like this could get them anywhere near such an efficiency boost in terms of clocking.  The critical path in the SHA logic is not constant inputs - it's the adders - 32-bit adders that need to execute in one clock means you have a 32-bit carry chain to deal with, and I would likely assume that is going to be the critical path here - 32-bit adder carry chains with inputs that need to be xor'd.

From little information he has provided, IMO just seems fake and I hate to say it, but very chinese.  I love his reactions in that reddit thread - people criticize the legitimacy and retorts with "FINE MAYBE WE SHOULDN'T GIVE YOU ANY INFORMATION" - LO-fucking-L.  I don't know who is still interested in this vaporware, but it's definitely got me not interested - who wouldn't want to deal with someone like this?

I'm not even sure if photos/videos of this thing "working" will cut it at this point.  Maybe if it was a spur of the moment - someone asks for a pic/video of this thing running, and 5 minutes later these guys post a response because they actually have it running live.  But the way it is now, I'd expect any further "proof" to be highly constructed/photoshopped/faked.  How is he even supposed to "proove" he has one of these things up and running?  It's like an iphone jailbreak video - it's a freaking video, it's so easy to fake that shit - it's so easy to shoot it 100 times till you stop making a mistake.  It's like one of those japanese video magicians....

I don't know, but at least in my mind or someone prooves me wrong with some real solid proof - this just screams scammer to me.

Here are some questions I would ask and expect to be answered with out giving away the technical details of the implementation of the design.

What is the core clock rate of the chip?  How many SHA engines are running?  How many clocks for each core to produce a hash?  Are they fully pipelined?

@magik well i dnt take any position if scam or not till i have it here, as ASICMINER stated he will start to deliver august 6. delivery to switzerland usualy takes like 10 days from shenzhen or hongkong. Till then we all just guess around.

The specifications of the hardware or a video is in my oppinion not realy a way to proove, magik is right that today is everythign fakable. Like i allready wrote, it will prove it wrong or right if the stuff arives here and we are able to hook it to http://mine.tenobis.com. I will create there a new worker for the ASICMINER and you can monitor by yourself at the stats page http://mine.tenobis.com/stats.php how the hardware works.

I understand that ASICMINER is a bit discouraged from this discussion, but hey even slush had to proove himself in the beginning, aswell as the TENOBIS MINE. Im not sure but ASICSMINER sounds to me like a marketing man, and not like a Techie.

My position is that we will know when we have the hardware here, hooked up to the mine, where everyone can see the result by himself

Openrune

It doesn't look good at all. The "blurred prototype" is totaly stupid. Any engineer on earth knows they wouldn't be "scooped" or beaten to market if someone saw their pcb traces....

Also if it really is a custom made ASIC then the numbers on the front are indistinguishable, its just a serial number and a company, there is no reason to blur it.

ALSO you dont make prototype asics.... you do most of your testing and prototype in VHDL (a hardware programming language) and then spend $millions to have the chips made.

It is possible they are using the word ASIC improperly to just mean their own fpga solution? But if that is the case they are not very knowledgeable engineers.


All of the secret sauce is in the firmware.

The only reason to blur traces is because you didnt have any to begin with. It may just mean they are way behind schedule, but if not, it is clearly shady deception.

This is really shady sounding to me.

This.  :D

You're pissing away your money openrune. I can't believe somebody would actually fall for this, after everything that's been said against it! Answer me this: have you ever heard of a "re-programmable ASIC"? It's an oxymoron

I think it's time to ban asicminer or lock this thread or something. How about labeling asicminer as a scammer?

Personally I'd like to keep the thread open, at least for entertainment value (munch munch). But it should probably be moved out of the Newbie section at the very least.

:D I'd like to see what kind of excuse AsicMiner can come up with against this offer :D

Maybe you might just want to get your friend to check out his address too. I have a suspicion it's just one of those registered/virtual office addresses.

source (http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/ixqrw/asic_miner_a_dedicated_bitcoin_mining_device/c27p1g4)

That's the end of that, folks.

lol, problem, asci miner?

Well asicminer if you dnt plan to deliver i ask you for imediate refund

Thanks


Openrune

Lol best part:

He does say within 48 hours, heh.  That said, you can't just "refund" BTC, right?  I mean, the address they came from is a sending address, so a receiving address would have to be provided before the refund could be made, right?  Assuming I am, I like the response comment from the aforementioned source, as if the BTC were magically going to be sent back to mtred and end up mtred's or in someone else's account.

Ok, valid point.
The coins could indeed be sent back to the address they came from but it could be an eWallet address as well. The coins then wouldn't be received by the intended person.
I'm very curious about if the people how paid the 5 BTC are gonna get their coins back. But we'll see.

It could be totally true, there was a research paper from the Chinese University of Hong Kong about using Pilchard "RAM" boards for DES encryption in ECB mode back in 2004.
http://microsys6.engr.utk.edu/~bouldin/pilchard.pdf
http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~phwl/mt/public/archives/old/ceg5010/pilchard.pdf

"Because the bitcoin community is concerned this might be a scam here and here, we decided to lower the amount required for order eligibility from 15 to 5 BTC"

That's such an unbelievable gap in logic there that I think it's actually a typo.  It should say:

"Because this is a scam, as pointed out here and here, we decided to lower the amount required for order eligibility from 15 to 5 BTC so people are more willing to fall for it"

ARM chips are not capable of that kind of calculations at those rates also btw.

I'm glad this thread is over... unfortunately this isn't

http://www.motifake.com/image/demotivational-poster/0902/scam-wow-aka-stimulus-bill-obama-president-taxes-democrats-e-demotivational-poster-1233807498.jpg

And they probably wanted us to believe that this is the paper they used as inspiration:
http://www.ee.usyd.edu.au/people/philip.leong/UserFiles/File/papers/sha_fpl02.pdf

Problem is that this paper is pretty old, and the hardware they mention is outdated. If other people in this forum with much more modern FPGAs couldn't come up with a feasible implementation, there is no way that this could be competitive. This paper was written before GPGPUs became common.

And I couldn't find a more modern version of this Pilchard module.

Well, ASIC miner is closing its doors http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/iynpe/asicminernet_calls_it_quits_wont_sell_product_for/

they claim they just sold a batch to an investor, im gonna go ahead and call bull and say the total network hash wont increase 2.5 terahashes..

i guess we can watch block explorer and find out :)

will mean will just take longer to get trough 21.000.000


I will keep going ;)...


 ;Ddig baby dig

Alright I admit it, I'm the one who bought his entire batch. But out of love for my fellow bitcoin miners and not wishing to drive away potential bitcoin users, I had decided that I will only put one machine into operation every 3 days, which is why in turn I required that they don't duplicate the machine in the next 3 years.

LargeCoin continues to plug away quietly, and it's not a scam. For more information, http://largecoin.com.

I signed up for your list already!

i've also signed. this is really interesting to mine with special hardware -> less power

did you ever get that refund?

NO REFUND!

Do you mean "so far" (as opposed to "until this very moment") in American English, or did you actually JUST get your refund when you posted?

For anyone still in doubt, I can confirm that it is, indeed, a SCAM.
See his post on reddit:
And just last night he sent me an email:
Now why would he be refunding 5 BTC back to everyone if he still has a couple to sell??  :-\  Anyone who gave him 5 BTC - you will never see it again.  So don't hold out any hope.

Well if you try to call there, his phone is turned off cause of insuffcient funds...
i guess the HK Police Department will prosecute this, if you didnt get your refund aswell:
http://www.police.gov.hk/ppp_en/contact_us.html

As a person who's actually done an FPGA bitcoin mining design that uses block RAM (though not in exactly this way), I know that it's part of the FPGA itself and not a seperate chip. There's no reason why a specially-designed Bitcoin mining board would need an SRAM chip; SRAM is large and slow and a Bitcoin miner needs fast access to a small amount of data. This wasn't even a competent scammer...

Edit: Oh, and the reason it doesn't use block RAM in that particular way? Doing so is only worthwhile if you're designing a standard SHA-2 hash engine that computes the hashes of variable-length pieces of data one at a time, whereas efficient Bitcoin mining compute lots of hashes of differing short pieces of data in parallel.

Which was why I was asking him what part did he used since I expected there would be at least two trip up. The first being unless there's some really super fast breakthrough Flash chip, it would be pretty much damning evidence regardless of his answer :D

Aha - cunning!

Soo... Now i'm wondering how many people have 'invested' in this guy.

Anyone dare to speak up?
 8)

Anyone got refunds in the meantime?

They should be sending out free prototype chips like other companies which develop new technologies do!

LOL, that'll be the day.  Try-before-you-buy dedicated mining hardware.