Its a rather crucial part of the chip package. Its like a mini PCB.


Yep. Though to be fair, thats exactly how it went with KnC, and  I assume they did plenty of testing with an FPGA. Of course its entirely possible (likely even) they will run in to more hickups, like the firmware issues KnC had. If they dont get packaged chips in the next 10 days, I seriously doubt they will ship anything before the tail end of November.

Out of curiousity, where did you get that number from?
For the record, I suspect its *far* more than that. So far KnC seems on track to ship almost 3000 "boxes" for the "september" orders alone (https://www.kncminer.com/news I counted 2385 boxed and one 'good day' of production to go), that would be well over $10M for just one month, and KnC always seemed like the smaller underdog to me.

Im assuming they will still be behind hashfast too, despite their delay. Even if not, the bulk of the orders has probably already happened anyway, especially at the high initial premium prices, and ActM would have been perceived as being third.

Clearly thats not the job of the SEC and similar organisations all over the world, but what registering securities with them does guarantee is precisely whats been lacking with bitcoin securities: transparency. A registered security at least guarantees you know who you are dealing with (Labcoin anyone?), it guarantees the issuer makes public all kinds of relevant information regarding the business, business plan, financials etc so that investor can actually make a rational decision and doesnt have to gamble on it being yet another scam or not.

Of course that doesnt help too much if these securities trade on platforms that close their doors one day for whatever reason, possibly taking customer funds with them, hence a need to trade them on regulated exchanges. Now thats going to be a tall order for a bitcoin venture, but perhaps the crowd funding legislation you alluded to in your next post will make this more viable. I certainly hope so. Right now the bitcoin security (misnomer if there ever was one) scene is more akin to a casino on second life, than a true investment market.

Yes turnaround is a lot faster, but honestly, if the other vendors are bottlenecked because they didnt get enough wafers, they are beyond stupid for not having ordered a ton more. They cost next to nothing compared to their resale value, better to order too many than too few. You can always sell the chips separately if needed, and its not likely you wouldnt be able to sell them above manufacturing cost.

My point however, is that despite the shorter development cycle of a structured asic, ActM is probably going to be only third on the 28nm market, and quite far behind in preorders. This approach would have absolutely perfect to beat all the others to market, and being first, the negatives of worse power consumption and higher unit cost would have been mostly irrelevant.

Oh man, how often does one have to explain this? US law applies to the US market. A chinese selling stock in a Lebanese company through an unlicensed exchange based in Malta and hosted in Belize *is* breaking US security laws if those stocks are readily available to US investors. Why do you think BSTCT closed its doors? Why do you think BF doesnt want US investors?

Now, here is the clue.  In the above sentence replace "US" with any other civilized country in the world you want, and the same applies. Didnt I just quote the relevant part that concerns Hong Kong's SFC ? You want me to dig up the same laws for EU countries? Japan? Russia? The essence is identical everywhere. Well, who knows,  maybe not in Nauru, but since these securities are offered on all other markets too, that doesnt change a bloody thing other than that the Nauru government may not care.

Full custom or standard cell asic wont change a thing about the maskset price. The "first batch wafer cost", we can safely ignore in this context, at $4000 per wafer, thats noise. As for the design, well, for a bitcoin asic that shouldnt cost more than $100k either. So Id say we are in agreement on the cost of the mask set.


Yes, but you said NRE of this was higher and then mentioned it cost $1M. The reality is the opposite, if your $1M is correct (and it certainly sounds plausible to me), its a considerably lower NRE than a traditional asic.


Again, I agree and always did say its a sensible approach, although the advantage of fast time to market is basically lost by now, and I worry about the power consumption handicap. Time will tell.

TL;DR hashhast batch 1 customers will probably have to endure 3 more difficulty adjustments before mining a single satoshi, and are officially screwed.

First of all,  $1M is way lower than you would pay for a full maskset on 28nm. Depending on the number of layers and who you believe, that could easily cost $3-$5M. Im just talking about the physical mask, not the design.

Secondly, I dont think you understand how structured asics work. They cant be prefabricated, or at least no entirely. Easic may do wafers with some of the standard layers ready, but they will still need to be processed at the fab to implement the customized routing and extra layers. Its not like easic can take those from the shelve, its not an fpga. So whatever price you heard, is that for fully processed wafers, or preprocessed wafers? Either way, per wafer price is going to be (substantially) higher than for traditional asics, otherwise everyone would do it.

The whole point of nextreme is lowering the NRE for smaller volumes by eliminating the need for a full mask set.  

prove it.

For some perspective, going by their specs, hashfast would get ~750 100GH dies (4 dies in one packaged chip)  out of a 300mm wafer, so ~75TH per wafer. ActM uses a structured asic, there is a penalty for that, but I dont know how big. Not likely more than a factor 2x, so Im guessing they should get at least ~40TH per wafer.  What can you deduce from that? Nothing really, because we dont have a clue of easic nextreme wafer pricing.

Yeah because we all know selling unregistered securities is legal when they are profitable and illegal when they are not. Thats what the law says.

Duh. No one said bitcoin is illegal. But the fact securities are traded for bitcoin instead of dollar, euro's, gold or oil is irrelevant.  The fist thing the SFC will look at is not how labcoin (ab)used the funds, but how they raised them. And they clearly did it in breach of laws all over the world.

BTW. "per-mediating a scam". ROFL.

Thank you BFL for taking forever to get anything out of the door. Thanks to that, my GPU's were able to mine almost a year longer than I ever dreamed.

Get a clue. *ALL* those bitcoin denominated securities are illegal. Even asicminer. This has been argued and proven ad nauseam in the relevant stock exchange threads. You dont need any kind of investigation to establish that, the fact they were selling unregistered securities to unsophisticated investors makes it a violation of security regulation in just about any civilized country on this planet, regardless of where labcoin is headquartered (if anywhere) and regardless of where the exchange operates from.

AFAIK, they looked in to the possibility, perhaps did some work on it, but decided it wasnt worth it. Too difficult/expensive

I sold some, like I sell some coins on every rally, even the one to $30. And no, I dont regret it. Havent bought coins in years, and dont intend to. I plan to sell ~50% of my coins over the next year, maybe two years, hang on to the rest for at least 5 years, so that whatever happens, Ill be golden. I accumulated them when they were worth  $4 or so on average.

Just do the math. Take hashfast specs; 324mm² 260W = 0.8W per mm².
If you look at that intel cpu, its a ~80mm² die for lets say 100W TDP. You may think that equals 1.25W per mm², but in the hotspots its probably closer to 100x that.

Bitmoon: