Forgot to add, don't underestimate what you can do with 40nm, especially if it's a full custom design.

Hi Canary, thanks for your post and for raising that point. Yes, we have taken into account that there will be a ton of Asicminer product in circulation. Our prediction is a fairly linear network growth averaging around 30PH a month from July to December, ending up just below 300PH. From what we understand of the chip, that's equivalent to 25 Million of them or about 10,000 wafers worth.

Their higher than expected power useage will have ramifications about how they are deployed, so earlier predictions about them taking over the network probably won't happen. Yet. We've done some calculations on how much a system with their chip would cost, and for the purposes of this exercise we've put them into a 4U rack enclosure, with 4TH power. So each box would draw about 3.5kW, or nearly 4kVA, with 10 in a rack - 40TH -that's a power footprint of 40kVA per rack. We'll ignore cooling for just now.

The raw box build cost in 10k volumes comes out at approximately $1800, or $450/TH. Then the boxmaker/miner has to incur other costs to get the units hosted, installed and powered up. For a rack's worth, that going to come close to $24,000, or $0.6/GH.  If this is a professional, dedicated mining setup then they'll have other admin costs as well, ditto if they've borrowed money, but we'll set both these aside for now.

The point is, to get this level of power up and running solely with Asicminer kit is going to incur costs of about $23,000 x (180000/40) =$104 Million

We have a metric in our proposal regarding how much you should pay per GH of power depending on when you actually get it delivered, based on the US average power bill. These rigs will likely be deployed in Washington state, with power costs after taxes etc of around 4 cents/kWh.
Based on our formula - which includes power costs and assumes a break even period of 6 months -  then what should be paid per Gh is around $1.1 in September, $0.83 in December, $0.62 in March 2015. People building capacity at these levels don't just slap the money down and get hashing the next day, they have to plan well in advance and make a lot of guesses as to what will happen to the Btc price. The figures we've just shown that up until next March they will break even after 6 months, but after that the return might not be so great. Factor in hosting costs or, if you've got you own setup, rent/taxes and the rest then it might look like an awfully big rig to sink so much money into it.

Long answer to your question, sorry, but I'm guessing you want an explanation that gives some qualification? Summary would be that unless the Btc exchange rate stays significantly above $500 for the next few months, investors are going to do their sums and be very wary of how much they build and when.

Hope this helps.

Hello Dogie, thanks for your post and input.

This isn't exactly mass manufacturing, but if you look at our FAQ's we've already said that it's a lot of systems to ship in a small(ish timeframe. It would be true if you has never been involved in such projects before and so didn't know what pitfalls or problems there might, but if you have experience and the correctset of skills, particularly product engineering and a set of known and trusted supplies and subcontractors, there's a very good chance that the whole process can run very smoothly.

We also said that most of the non-custom build would be done before we get the asic'c back, that includes the enclosures, PSU's, the controller boards and the DC-DC converters. Because our systems are modular, all these parts can be assembled and tested without the asic, in particular the Pi and it's ability to connect properly to the network. It can 'practice' mine with no asic just to test things out. The DC-DC converters can be burnt-in with dummy loads, ditto the PSU's.

The actual hashing modules will be built for us by a subcontractor. The on board MC can test functionality with having to be fixed into a system, so this speeds things up a lot. Once we have working modules, they get fixed into the rigs and get a full test with the network.

Hope this addresses your concerns.

These are ones selected by their companies for various reasons, or those on public registers. IBM will not tell you about every individual they employ.

OK, so now we've given you on - die device sizes, power share per device - well, you can work it out from the device specs - so you can evaluate some metrics about what's happening at transistor level.

Please get back to me at your earliest convenience.

It's a question but again it comes down to brass tacks. Limkedin profiles mean nothing, and no reputable company willgive out details about former or present employees, or what they worked on. So basically you cant trust anything anyone says online about their background or experience. Measure it from what they present.

We came on the forums, as you say, to see if we can raise extra finance. Indiegogo is our primary funding platform. Whether you contribute to the project or not is a personal decision, as is ours to restrict information about our staff.

What we've pitched contains about 5 times as much as all the past proposals put together with a lot more real data. We appreciate people got royally rooked by other companies, but that does'ntmean to say we will do the same.

Thanks for posting, though. Like your work  with the WASP project.

Hi Roadstress, I was asking about your specific question about the J/GH at the chip. I'm sorry, but I missed your other post but I will respond to it later. We are very well aware of what other companies have done

It's always good advice to be cautious, but first have a look at my 'update' post put on earlier today. Thanks for reminding me. Any comment on our J/GH figure in light of the info?

Hi Johnny,

Thanks for the post. Mind if we use your 'compressed' words in the future? Couldn't have put it better ourselves.

Hi, and thanks for you post. The only difference is in the price - it's a reward for contributing early. Apologies for the website, we were not planning initially to put one up at all.

We've given more than enough engineering data for any competent asic / system designer to look at and pass comment on - an awful lot more than any other company has ever given at this stage. Trouble is. on these forums you never know who is really independent let alone competent.

Thanks also for your encouragement. Believe me, we've faced a lot tougher crowds than this in our careers; we're patient and persistent and will defend our project to the end.

Well put, and exactly in line with our ethos. I'm sure you've read through our proposal but due to it's length it takes a few readings to fully understand how we have approached the project.

Firstly, it's not a one off, and our GSP idea came about because, as we said, we want to build a sustainable business, not get rich quick. That means we carry our first adopters, for want as a better expression , 'with' us and make sure they are the ones we look after and help to maximise their earnings. No other company has ever proposed this.
 
Secondly, we're firmly against centralisation and at the risk of concerted attacks on ourproject we come to it again and again in our proposal and say how we're going to help the 'little guy' compete against the hash farmers. Not everyone welcomes that idea, I can tell you.

No matter how much you would like it to happen, no commercial company is going to basically issue 'shares' to investors, supply them with a rig then on going profits. You can buy a cloud hashing deal, but the less said about those the better.

We are saying: back us to get the project started, we'll give you something that will give you an immediate financial advantage when it's delivered then keep you supplied with discounted hardware to keep that advantage. Maybe not exactly what you would wish for, but unfortunately it's the best we can offer just now.

That's not so say that a future project might not follow your suggestion more closely.

Thanks for taking the time to post this.

Thanks for posting that. We quite understand people's skepticism, it's not nice to have your money and/or resources stolen, especially if they are the only resources you have.

 If you come from a similar environment then you'll know that being patient is a very necessary virtue, as is integrity and accuracy. We are very patient, and are more than happy to keep defending our project for as long as necessary. We may not get funded in the end, but as I'm sure you know any project can yield potentially yield future rewards even if it fails.

You're dead right about the 'space' though. A lot of the behaviour inside it certainly doesn't entice outsider to participate, and that impedes it's growth.

Thanks also for your good wishes.

Thanks for reading our proposal Martin. We'll get back to you soon on this.

Fair comment, and that's exactly what we would propose to deliver except that after you get you product we give you incentives to make more money in return for further production orders delivered exacty when needed. That's as close to an 'investor' reward as any company will give you. If you look at our proposal and our prediction for 'Jane', you'll see that we have absolutely no need to mine with customers machines, if every early customer took up our GSP program then we would make our margin off discounted machines/modules.

We are the only company that seems to have actually looked to the future after we get funded. Hashing farms are not on our radar, but we can see a tidal wave of the damn things approaching rapidly, so unless one of the existing manufacturers steps up to the plate and drops their prices very significantly, most miners are totally screwed.

I can only offer my sympathies for what happened to you before. Must have led a very bad taste in your mouth.

UPDATE

Forgot to add in the technical information, the power distribution figures include all relevant clock power. In all it makes up about 14%.

Hi Ben,

Thanks for your input.

Strictly speaking you're buyers, not investors. We promise you delivery of an item at a future date in return for your payment. I can see why you might think that though, your 'investment' , as it were, is to give you a commercial advantage when your item gets delivered.

As a company we will use virtually all the money we get in orders to fund system development, satisfy those orders and stay afloat while doing so. After that we have to try to solicit more orders to keep the company going and invest in R&D for new products.   

That's a perfectly reasonable approach. Trouble is, to get to the stage of being able to produce a sellable product you need a huge amount of money, and the only way to do that is to get funding - a lot of it. If it comes from a single third party, then it usually means that the end customer will pay a lot more as the third party wants their money back, and then some.

If there's no new players to compete against the existing suppliers then you have limited choices, and that's not so good.

Thanks for your feedback.

If you look a couple of posts back, we've already answered this. Thanks for popping by, though. Did you like our pitch?

UPDATE

Well, it's coming to nearly the end of out first day on this forum, and it's been very interesting.

First of all, thank you to everyone that's taken the time to post on our thread. There's been a fair old mixture and it's obvious that there's many different views about our project and how we're going about it. That's perfectly normal and healthy.

Secondly, thank you to the posters that have taken the time to read right through the proposal and come back with sensible, relevant questions.

Lastly, we really appreciate the numerous emails sent to us wishing us good luck with the project and commenting on how the mining community needs something like this (even if it's not our chip) to compete in the future. It's sad to note that some said they wouldn't post on the thread for fear of being harangued by trolls, but that's the way of things.

As regards the comments about our lack of technical information, it's rather puzzling to us. Give any one of our engineers a die size, process step, power dissipation and hashrate of a mining asic and he'll tell you in about two minutes what it might look like inside. Any competent asic engineer could do the same thing. An SHA256 pipeline mostly contains only three building blocks, namely a full adder, flip flops and a 32 bit fast adder. Yes, there are other gate functions but those three dominate the area and power.

There are few different ways to implement the function as the arithmetic algorithm is fixed. We've saved some gates by using a word expander that generates 2 words per stage instead of one, but that's not particularly original. Where we have saved most area is in the implementation of the full adders and to  lesser extent in the stage flip flops. No matter who asks, we are not going to reveal how we have done these implementations or give nay clues to said - that's our IP and what makes our solution different. What we can tell you is that the power distribution looks like this:

Flip flops : 46.2%
Full Adders (in carry save chain):31.3%
A,E and Word generator Adders: 22.5%

We can also tell you that the area of our full adder is 1.74 square microns, the flip flop is  2.02. The rest of the design information is confidential.


No one has as yet commented about some aspects of our proposal, which we find odd, namely:

- The fact that we have designed our chip to be fault tolerant using extra pipelines as 'spares'

- Our Guaranteed Supply Program to support our core customers

- Our metrics for measuring what price should be paid per GH of capacity over time

So it either means that no one has read about them, or has no comment to make. Are they good/bad/informative/deceptive/wrong/right and soon. Instead there's been constant badgering about who we are.

We expect that most of this comes about from the fact that we come from a corporate environment where individuality is not seen as an asset. We have a different way of approaching sale pitches and projects that is probably somewhat alien to the forum members. Giving you a list of names, companies and accomplishments is totally meaningless because you cannot check if they are accurate or made up. Technical details you can check, and when our engineers saw some of the original specs for power dissipation on competitors chips, they knew they were way too optimistic. Who designed them was irrelevant.

So no, we are not going to give you any other details about our staff. At least we're being up front about it instead of pulling in some guys (and gals) off the street, doing a photo shoot and giving you a load of baloney about their background.

For any competent electronic engineer, our fault tolerance approach should be a dead giveaway as to the environment it came from, as should the fact that we've put a 32 bit microcontroller on each hashing module that will constantly test and rotate the pipelines to ensure data coherency, AND allows them to self test before they get bolted into a machine. That type of system approach doesn't come out of thin air, yet draws no comment, nor does our comments about product engineering.

We also thought long and hard about how we could keep our customers competitive long term. Now if we wanted to scam people, that's not the first thing that we would take any time or effort to consider. We've come up with a way to do it that's original - as a far as we can see no other company has ever suggested anything remotely like it - and it doesn't rely on the customer funding a second round of asic development.

So all in all a mixed bag, but interesting. Please keep the relevant questions coming.

I must also apologise to Spondoolies for even suggesting that they might employ someone to 'represent' them on the forums. It was unprofessional, so sorry guys, good luck with your 28nm chip.

Thanks for your post. I can tell you from experience that VC companies most definitely do not have the interests of the end customers at heart.

The ones that we approached were happy to fund us, but not for selling mining equipment to the public, only for in house use. There are quite clearly  lots of them now bankrolling the building of massive hashing farms, and the individual miner is going to be squeezed out of existence unless someone does something about it.

Here's some facts to consider about VC funded programs:

1. The first thing they want is an Exit Strategy, which translates to "how soon do I get my 3 times my investment back?"

2. They don't like anything that involves very long leadtimes unless there's a huge prize at the end

3. They don't like anything that sounds remotely altruistic or that panders to a special group of people - quick profit is everything

4. They will want a company run in a manner that gets then the fastest return, not one that builds a good, sustainable business.


Of course they have their place, and like it or not the world needs them.

They are no friends of Bitcoin miners, I can tell you that,