I assume this second batch of 50TH/s be distributed amongst the shareholders? What is the status with Nefario?

The BFL Single and SC upgrade have already been purchased. I am not a bank and did not feel comfortable holding onto 100+ BTC while Nefario takes his time providing the list. Hopefully a list is provided soon and we can get back to distributing these gifts as well as voting on decisions like this.

Thanks for your reply, but that's all speculation. Hard facts would help all of us to recover some confidence in this project. And btw friedcat said it's not even half completed (13 layers out of the total 29). Let's not even euphemize the litte solid info we have.

Update

They are at the stage of wafer-process, which is the last one before slicing and packaging, and is the most time-consuming. They have finished 13 layers out of the total 29, and there are 16 layers to go. The speed was originally very low (1-2 layers a week), and had become quicker in recent weeks.

While the foundry haven't not give out the estimated time, our foundry agent did. The person in charge gave us the oral promise of December, but not as an extra formal deadline in the contract.

A mail to the board has also been sent to reply and discuss the revising of the business plan. Board members please post your advices if you have some time. Thanks.

He already gave out a couple of lists worth some days. Taking out the last weekend he isnt way too behind his plans. I hope its this way... at least he is still in contact.

I'll start with this because you've just proven my point. You pre-ordered CoDBO2, presumably for a discount. Let's say you paid for it $40, and now that's it out it costs $50. Is it worth $40 because you paid $40 for it? No, it it's worth $50 because that's what it trades for now (assuming friction-free exchangeability). You were willing to shell out $40 in advance in order to get something in the future which will then be worth $50.

This is not the direction of causality, but rather of deduction. It's not that the past delivery time causes the worth to be higher. It's that because of the delay, we deduce that its worth is higher. If people were willing to shell out $600 a month ago to get a single now, it must mean a single now is worth more than $600. Likewise for mini-rigs, and since the delay for them was higher, the implied worth is greater.

With mining devices, the revenue they generate over time must be properly understood when doing valuation calculations. You paid for your single earlier than most, but that doesn't cause it to be worth now more than other singles; you cashed out the benefit of your early investment with the mining output it generated over the time since receiving it. On the same note, if people are willing to pay $600 to get a single within 4 weeks, they'd be willing to pay much more to get a single now and have it generate income over these 4 weeks.

Anyone know which way friedcat decided to go with this? ie.e sell hardware, shares, selfmine?

The mistake here is assuming that a mini-rig is worth $15295.

At the time when the devices were bought, $15295 didn't get you a mini-rig. It got you a mini-rig to be delivered several months in the future. An actual mini-rig in your possession is hence worth much more than $15295.

At the same time $600 would get you a single within a few weeks. So a single is worth more than $600, but not by much.

It depends on what you invested them on:

Refresh the page and scroll down again and it shows. Make sure you test it i another browser first before anything.

If yo want to use multiple 2fa accounts you need to enter the code manually not scan it.

I think they are still sticking with the plan to write their own software for the first batch, then provide some software developers with a board to help develop software for the masses

Sorry for my bad communication of giving people the impression that we claim to write the software from scratch.

What in my mind was the scenario of our own deployment of our first batch of THashes when I replied the question. The software needs to be modified to adapt our hardware protocol and optimized for larger size of works from the network. This part would first be done with ourselves because it allows quicker iteration.

Since we don't sell our boards until later batches, and mere specification is not enough for other people to support our products with their software, we (Bitfountain side) talked about giving a small number of sample boards to the community for evaluation and development before we accept any orders. The final plan should be discussed among board members and approved by shareholders.

I'm relatively active between 1:00AM to 3:00PM of forum time each day. Contacting me within this time interval could get quicker responses.


(Recent update: We are collecting the shareholders data. Please check:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg1264071#msg1264071)

As some people might have already known, we have been working
on our own design of ASIC miner chips for quite a while.
(https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91173.0) The front-end (RTL) design,
optimization and simulation has finished and we are currently focusing on the
physical design. From existing data, we are convinced that it will be very
profitable thanks to the reasonable NRE, low margin cost, and revolutionary
speed and power consumption compared to all the current mining devices. Our
project will greatly contribute to the Bitcoin community and Bitcoin itself, by
offering nice return to investors and at the same time securing the network
significantly.

We are in a close race with our competitors. It is quite possible that
Bitfountain will be the one to have the world's first working ASIC-based
devices for Bitcoin mining. In this case, there will be fantastic early return.
Even if we are not the earliest, our company will still have a lot of room to
make money, because the impossibly insane price wars are not likely to happen,
or at least not all at once if they do.

About the Company ASICMINER is a GLBSE-listed partner company of the
Bitfountain IC company registered in China. After the fully issuing of
ASICMINER shares, each one of ASICMINER and Bitfountain controls 50% power to
make decisions and shares 50% of the total profits, but the ASICMINER investors
will first get 100% of the total profits until they have their principals paid
back. After the first payment, the dividends will always be paid weekly in each
Wednesday of Beijing time.

To be more detailed, ASICMINER has 200,000 shares in total. Each share gets
1/400,000 of the voting power of, and the regular dividends from, the Bitfountain
IC company registered in China. In addition, before investors of ASICMINER
break even against the IPO price, all net gains from Bitfountain will be paid
to them. The issuer could stop selling ASICMINER whenever enough funds for the
expenses are collected.

IPO The GLBSE ticker is ASICMINER. 200,000 shares are issued. Initially,
30,000 are for public sale. 170,000 are for private bulk purchase via PMs and the
asset transfer system of GLBSE. The ratio may be adjusted but the total number is
always 200,000. The price per share is set at 0.1BTC. Given the fluctuation of BTC price,
the IPO will be closed when collected funds exceeds the expected expense and the
expected abundance reservation. No more shares will be released to the market other
than the very 200,000 ones.

Each investor who privately buys 5,000 or more shares will get extra 10% ones,
plus a position on the board of Bitfountain. 10,000 or more shares will get
another extra 2.5%. Board members could ask for details of Bitfountain, as well
as inspecting and monitoring our financials.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

Business plan and Estimated Return The expected starting date of chips
manufacturing is late August to September, 2012. The chips are supposed to be
deployed and start hashing in October to November, 2012.

After the ASIC miner chips are produced and deployed, we will first directly
mine with them, then use part of the revenue to make user-friendlier mining
boards or rigs for sale.

If our chips are successfully produced, all the following businesses will
contribute to the shareholders' return:
  Self-Mining with First Batch of Chips At least 12TH/s in
total, that is equivalent to 30MH/s per share, or 300MH/s per BTC.
  Hashrate/Chip/Board Selling Net profits are
conservatively calculated as $5 per GH/s. That roughly equals to 0.5BTC per
GH/s with the current BTC/USD exchange rate. It means that each time we sell
1TH/s of hashing power in various forms, the net profit per share will be
1.25mBTC, that is, 1.25% of the initial investment.
  Self-Mining after Mass Production Unlimited hashrate in
theory because of the low margin cost. But in reality we have to consider the
cost of management (labor) and place (rent). We believe an expansion to 50TH/s
is not hard to achieve. That pushes the hashrate per share to 155MH/s, or
1.55G/s per BTC.
  Next-Generation Products The plan will be discussed among
board members and approved by shareholders, because it would require keeping
some of the revenues instead of paying them all as dividends. The return of
this stage is difficult to estimate, since in the Bitcoin world everything may
happen and happens even quicklier than imagination. But we personally believe
that much more potential profits wait there.

Potential Risks and Tips on How to Hedge We list all possible risks of
our project here, and the most straightforward way to hedge each of them.
  BTC drops too much in value This will finally make mining
unprofitable because even with ASIC devices people still have to pay
electricity bills and operating fees. Hedge: take a short position on BTC.
  BTC increases too much in value This might make your
investment of your Bitcoins to ASICMINER less profitable than simply holding
them. Hedge: take a long position on BTC.
  Failure to produce The IC production has some minimum
failure rate. We have some fund reservation ourselves to cope with this
scenario, but the risk here is still not zero. Hedge: diversify your portfolio
by also making bets on our competitors.
  Outpaced too much by competitors It will make the
difficulty very high and our efficiency/price less attractive. Hedge: same as
above, making some bets on competitors of us.

Risk Compensation for Investors To further compensate the risks of
investors, we give investors following privileges.
  You Break Even First We (Bitfountain) will not take any
net profits from mining or device sales until the investors (ASICMINER) break
even against the IPO price (0.1 BTC per share). It means that each share of
ASICMINER will first have 1/x of the total net revenues as dividends, in which
x equals to the total number of ASICMINER shares in circulation, and have
1/400,000 after the principals of the investors are paid out.
  Return On Rally If the price of Bitcoin rallies too much,
then we probably don't need so much money to make our project succeed. We will
return part of the principals as big dividends before we tape out the chips
when BTC/USD exchange rate rises a lot.
  Return When Discontinuation If we haven't raised enough
money to tape out before August. 28, 2012, we will return 100.5% of the total
raised funds to investors of ASICMINER. The 0.5% is for compensating the GLBSE
fee.
  No Future Dilution Each share of ASICMINER always
represents 1/400,000 of the whole company. If we have to attract more investors
in the future, we will only sell our own Bitfountain shares.

Extra Words The OP is kept as brief and clear as possible, if you have
any further questions about details, just ask. Advices and criticisms are also
welcome.