I think we all really appreciate your analysis and tough questions Vbs, but to be fair they are aiming to start mining in September. All of the mining and sales profits will be paid out to the shareholders of BTCGARDEN weekly through btct.co. At the earliest,we will be start from the middle of September,2013, while our first batch of chips(200-300T) will be arrive and start to be deployed.As time is precious in current stage of the business, we have already paid for this first big-amount batch ,all shareholders can therefore expect a quicker & higher return than normal.
That's why I've asked for their projections, because there's different TH values everywhere and precise values and times make or break this deal (and chip specs too). A project of ASIC bitcoin mining is ongoing by our group, named btc-garden ( www.btcgarden.com). At the moment, we are at the stage of TAPE OUT. We have started our project since Feb.2013.Also, according to our timetable, we will have around 100T hashrate online on this August or September as our best situation. The following paragraphs are written to give out a brief introduction of this item. A relative detailed version will be posted on this board & our website at the beginning of June, 2013. Any questions or advices are welcomed in this thread. So, effectively, what is the size of the first batch?  |
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To be fair they claim to be starting to put thei stuff online by September am I correct? That chart a little misleading.
That chart is with a full bias towards them, on a best case scenario where they have 350TH mining in December from just the initial 2M sold shares, the chips turn out as good as expected and there is no more mining competition than what's been already increasing the past months, from the current hardware suppliers. You can simulate easily other scenarios: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/Also, 75% monthly difficulty rise until forever?
Until forever? It's only going up from those 75%. Those are only based on the hashrate added on the last 30 days. Yeah because that's sustainable, even though we will run out of all earth's resources by year 5 or so, we'll just have to start mining on Mars.
There's 11 years of ASIC development to catch up. 130nm is from 2002. Difficulty will start slowing down when the technical level approaches current die sizes. |
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The price goes up. The price goes down. The price goes up. The price goes down.
More IPOs for Mining Companies with big dreams show up.
The funds for those new, novel IPOs must come from somewhere, so maybe people are selling ActM to get into something else.
Why was there a recent drop from over .006 to .004x?
What do you think the price of ActM should be right now?
What new IPOs on BF and elsewhere look good?
I don't think there's anything else that looks good. All those >28nm chips will take a huge toll as the global network diff rises and they won't be able to compete due to their running power costs. In the 28nm die shrink all the new guys appearing want to grab all the profit for themselves as much as possible so they don't offer any investment options, just hardware for sale. Even most current 28nm designs look very sketchy. I can definitely understand ActM's ~16GH/s chip specs, but chips with 100GH/s? 400GH/s? Pulling one of those off requires a team with extreme 28nm knowledge and skill and I don't think anyone with both would choose to design a chip like that (they would need precise analog simulations, custom transistor design, etc, just to keep the signal interference inside those big chips at bay; much easier to design smaller and more efficient chips). |
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Some questions: 1) Can you give more detailed information regarding how you simulated chip power consumption? You are stating a very efficient 3.75W/GH/s for a 130nm node, while Avalon chips on a 110nm node (more efficient) are getting at best 6.6W/GH/s. 2) You are estimating deployment of 350TH by the end of 2013, and even with 3.75W/GH/s, that's a power consumtion of 1,312.5 kWh. How are you going to manage a 1.3 MWh facility?3) Can you provide a better explanation of your profit projections? Let's say all goes well and you have 350TH mining in the 1st of December 2013. Let's also assume you have incredible logistics and get the 350TH just from the current 2M shares @ BTC0.016. You'll have around ~5 months of profit before the huge energy bill starts eating the revenue and making the profit negative (~May 2014). Unfortunately, the cumulative return is also bound to never return those initial BTC32,000. Data: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ |
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If the chips are fully operational on the 1st of November without any delays (and they keep their promise of a max of 40W/chip, 10GH/s/W), the investors that are paying a total of BTC44,750 for 300TH (60%), will probably have an estimated max profit of ~16.8% until it tops out in October 2014. Data: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ Now, from the issuer's point of view... Notice the "Cumulative Return" column. Data: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ |
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If the chips are fully operational on the 1st of November without any delays (and they keep their promise of a max of 40W/chip, 10GH/s/W), the investors that are paying a total of BTC44,750 for 300TH (60%), will probably have an estimated max profit of ~16.8% until it tops out in October 2014. Data: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ |
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What's today's FUD menu? Hashfast?  Always interesting to see rushed chips popping out almost daily. I don't say, that such an implementation is impossible. But it's is extremely risky and the thermal and power issue will be the hell. And based on what they have shown so far, I would say they are far away from tape-out.
Thermal and power and simultaneous switching noise. Standard cell libraries are designed for standard toggle rates. SHA-2 is very close to the theoretical maximum toggle probability (when doing the approximate/probabilistic power/thermal/noise simulations). Is there any evidence that Uniquify designed a IC that required a heatsink? Or are they experienced CAD-monkeys that "design" ICs by cutting and pasting "intellectual property" black boxes to create SoC-s for the portable and battery-operated market segments? It would also probably help to define what the word "risk" means here. It isn't the risk of getting a non-working or extremaly bad yielding chip. The risk is that the chip has to be severely derated to actually work. And by derated I mean underclock but overvolt to combat the internal noise in the chip. The helveticoin user was also from some established ASIC design house and they had 28nm prototype hashing chips either late last year or early this year. But their design seems to be non-viable commercially because it was designed like just another integrated peripheral for the SoC CPU. |
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In response to pertinent new information regarding a key ACTM competitor's previously unknown targeted shipping date (December), you said An article from the same folks that ran the Avalon article?
I'm shaking in my boots.
Instead of reacting in a calm, rational manner, you used sarcasm to shoot the messenger (TGB) and deflect from the need to respond intelligently to the message. When I called you out for your boorish behavior, you again attacked the messenger (me). Instead of acting like a child and throwing a fit in the face of inconvenient facts, why not own your shitty attitude, man up, and accept this new reality? It's not that hard, Exocyst already has done so. I think CoinTerra is a serious competitor in the hardware sales department; however, ActM should have every opportunity to beat them to market with hardware AND if you remember Ken's initial goal with AMC, the goal is to dominate nethash--hardware sales are just a bonus for investors. Let CoinTerra drive mining hardware costs down, so long as ActM's cost is lower than CoinTerra's retail, then ActM should be able to gain hashing marketshare See? It's not that hard to act like an adult and drop the snotty petulant teenager attitude, even when a disliked messenger delivers Potentially Bad News.  Adult? Where, where?!?! |
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VBS, "The FUD stops here."
I am curious, what is 21112's background? Seems pretty obviously engineering. Is he an IC guy, or do you know?
Dunno, but there's some heavy IC design knowledge right there. He hit the nail on the head. |
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So why did you buy shares again?
If you read iCEBREAKER's posts he's been a supporter of AMC/ActiveMining for a long time now, I've never read anywhere he saying to have sold anything. He's just playing games. Edit: See above post! |
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Any news on the hardware/logistics front? 1. Chip specifications
There are substantial differences in the way the BFL chip is produced. They do employ a standard cell ASIC, while we went for a custom design with a focus on performances, achieved via a complex place & route procedure, which took our team almost one full-immersion month of work to complete.
We do confirm that we're expecting to obtain the initially declared performances with the 130nm round, but we will wait for the ICs to be ready, to better assess the yield quality in terms of chip grades.
2. 130 nm vs. newer technology
While 28nm technology is indeed superior, if fully taken advantage of, the NRE costs are enormously different, and so are the skills needed to design a working chip. We don't have the required resources, and we do not think the results obtainable are worth the costs right now, this is a strategy we will explore in the future.
We are happy with the obtained high performances and low consumptions with 130nm and we will show another breaktru' when the 65nm design is ready.
3. ETA
130nm IC is estimated to be delivered in early September and to be mining 7-10 days later.
65nm IC is still under development and no ETA is available yet.
4. General timeline
The following days we will focus on Q/A session and on the normal activities pertaining to our project.
As per your request of more pictures, here are some images of our test environment, with the WR703N router working as real world interface for the simulated IC running on the fpga.
Please provide detailed chip specs. Remember you are stating that you are able to get chips working at 4.8GH/s on a 130nm node (that's the equivalent of ~17 Avalon chips, which are built on a smaller die size of 110nm), using minimal power. What is the process? Die size? Voltages? Frequency? Etc? I'm sure you already have most of these specs set in stone since you are aiming for an early September delivery. Has the order been done with TSMC already? Please also show a pic/video of the prototype FPGA hashing at 4.8GH/s. Example of detailed chip specs: Avalon chip
Technology Summary:
TSMC 0.11- micron G process
5 Metal
Core Voltage: 1.2 V
I/O Voltage: 3.3 V
Core Frequency: 256+ MHz
Number of Pads: 48
8 Data
40+1 Power
Package Type: QFN48 -0.5 Pitch
Packaged Chip Size: 7 mm x 7 mm
Chip Interface
Data Pins (8 in total):
Clock i
Serial Data In [2] i
Serial Data Out [2] o
Serial Data Bypass [2] o
Reserved [1] -
Chip power efficienty: 6.6W/GHs @ 1.15 V
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Seems we'll be getting an eASIC Nextreme-3 too!  http://www.easic.com/easic-announces-strategic-investment-by-seagate/Cupertino, CA and Santa Clara, CA – August 5, 2013 – eASIC Corporation, a provider of NEW ASIC devices today announced a strategic investment by Seagate Technology (NASDAQ:STX). In addition to the equity investment, eASIC and Seagate also are exploring opportunities to jointly develop custom silicon solutions for Seagate’s portfolio of Solid State Drives (SSD) that would combine Seagate’s expertise in SSD with eASIC’s expertise in fast time-to-market, low-cost and low-power custom silicon solutions. (...) “We are extremely excited to be working with one of the world leaders in storage technology,” said Ronnie Vasishta, President and CEO of eASIC. “Seagate has an exceptional history in bringing world class technology and innovation to the storage market. Using our eASIC Nextreme-3 28nm single via configuration technology will help Seagate to bring storage innovation at a pace not yet seen in this industry,” added Vasishta. |
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Dr. ASIC? I thought he is 'the' King ASIC to you now!  Friendcat is King ASIC for now. But I did also consider saying 'Professor ASIC' since the dude wrote a textbook on the subject. No need to be jelly Vbs, I'm sure your CV is fairly impressive too!  |
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I feel that this discussion regarding potential competitors to ACTM is healthy in one aspect.
My gut feeling so far has been that those who are in favor of ACTM seem to assume that the competitors are going to sit on their hands, doing nothing while the 28 nm fast hashers get manufactured and shipped.
Of course that is not the truth, who knows what ASICMINER have up their sleeve for instance? And KnC? And other yet unknown companies.
At least now even the most blinded cheerleader of ACTM should be aware that we are not alone in the bitcoin mining universe.
Vbs: In your future projections sheet you posted a while ago, how big market % of hashing and sales did you guess ACTM would have? Has it been updated lately?
Disclamer: I am still long on this stock, and you guessed it, english is not my native language.
Yep, the competition will only increase and the >28nm feasibility argument of 110/130nm players is only going to hit the ground from now forward. Don't expect 20nm bitcoin mining hardware anytime soon, there are currently several technological hurdles to be resolved on that die shrink (better finFETs, etc) before it can be used to build power-hungry circuits made to operate 24/7. I haven't updated my spreadsheet lately, but I'm expecting that with $200M appearing for chip development they are expecting at least 2-3x of that in chip sales, so I think ActiveMining will definitely be in a very good position on that too. |
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OK, Dr. ASIC is the founder of Open-Silicon and 'only' heads Cointerra's advisory board. Obviously that's no biggie and I was worried over nothing. Whew, what a relief! Dr. ASIC? I thought he is 'the' King ASIC to you now! |
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(...)
http://www.cointerra.com/team/Cointerra’s ground-breaking architecture, design and development team is led by industry veterans Ravi Iyengar, Dr. David Tannenbaum and Jim O’Connor. The advisory board is headed up by Dr. Naveed Sherwani. Please go read what an advisory board means before such doom and gloom. The FOUNDER of Cointerra is Ravi Iyengar. |
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The 28nm pool is getting crowded!
Avalon story is now on the Wall Street Journal. "Famed Trader Joe Lewis Backs Bitcoin" The party is over folks. The party is over? LOL! I'd say the party is just beginning! How long until a behemoth whale finds ActiveMining "interesting"?  |
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http://www.cointerra.com/team/  says the adults are here, and intend on pushing over our little popsicle stand. Dr. Sherwani is the author of a textbook on Physical Design, which is widely used as the main textbook at major universities around the world. In addition, he has authored or co-authored three books and over 100 articles on various aspects of Physical Design Automation and ASICs. Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu…  The adults were already here: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/easic (eASIC received $23.5M in Venture Round funding. (7/10/13)) |
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