Hey, sorry for not posting the past days. Here is some news for you:
We just sold anything we had to a small indian company for a reasonable price. It was fun but all 3 of us are kind of happy we are out of this now. At least we didn't make any losses in the end.
Before anybody is asking: the company doesn't want it's name to be revieled, that was part of the contract.
But as far as I know the company wants finish the last few issues in design and then sell to the public.

Some more comments:

- Neither me nor the other two of us are nigerian. We are 2x French and 1x Ethiopian. Its up to you to figure out who is who.
- I am relieved I didn't reviel anything to proove this isn't scam. Otherwise we wouldn't have been able to sell.
- I am pretty sure asics will not destroy LTC. It will make it much more difficult to start another useless altcoin but thats no loss to me. It will way more likely stabelize the coin just like ASICs did with BTC. I will definitely keep trusting in LTC.
- If I just had a picture of the chinese guy! He told us his name was "Yangming Peng", but I don't believe this is his actual name any more.

Bye, and keep heads up!

Ok, I see this is not going to work the way we hoped.
I'm sorry not to be a native english speaker and I'm also sorry to have asked you for any financial support.
We are going through a rought time right now and neither do we have the time nor any motivation to fight all your claims this would be a scam.
We are no professional company and never intended to become one. We just wanted to inform you about what we are doing and hoped to get some kind of croud funding to make ASICs happen faster in your own interest.
We never had any visions of making the great money with this but we attemted contributing to stabilize the Litecoin network and maybe initiate the same effect we saw at Bitcoin at the beginning of this year.

Now we could start endless discussions about scam or no scam us telling you in more detail about our work and you finding loopholes in our posts to "proof" us wrong.
This is not going to happen because we have way more serious problems to face than convincing some bored and paranoiac guys tending to complain about anything.
There is no need to trust us and no need to help us but also no need to make fun of us.

We are not going to tell you about the hardware we are using. Knowing the parts even a one handey monkey could assemble an device that hashes faster than a 7990 GPU.
I could give you a blurry picture of our device that you would think is just a ugly old graphics card or a screenshot of the devide mining on a pool that could also be some standard devices mining on one worker or a screenshot of my own mining software showing you a hashrate you wouldn't believe anyway.
There is no point doing so but only giving away the knowledge what we gained.

We don't intend to ask for any help in engeneering because we wouldn't trust you anyway. The only thing that would help us would be money and I understood that nobody will spend even a cent to support something that is not promissed and proofed to pay out
Take the risk or just forget about us.

We will continue our work and keep mining until we break even with out costs an losses accured.
Maybe we will consider Luckybites advice and start selling shares, maybe we will sell our design to some company for large scale production or maybe there will be some chinese ASICs for sale soon because not only our money but also our knowlegde may have been stolen.

Don't be scared, we will not rush for any 51% attacks or concentrate too much hashpower on our side to endanger the trustability of the network.
If you want to be supportive and do have any questions despite of "what hardware are you using?", "could you send any photos/videos?" or "is this scam?" please feel free to write an email, this is my adress for this purpose: sebastian.asic.sky@gmail.com
We are thinking about opening a FAQ thred but that depends on your questions. I hope you won't abuse my mail adress to spam it with insults.
My (unpaid) vacation is over now so don't expect me to answer your mails within a minute.

Well, I didn't expect that kind of shit storm but I can understand your mistrust.
Only three people successfully working on an ASIC doesn't sound very authentic especially considering the costs you have in mind but I think this widely overestimated. I was suprised too that this worked out that well in only one year, but I really don't know what went wrong at BFL and friends. We largely used existing hardware and just assembled it in the right way. Some parts we had to design our selves of cause but this was and still is not a million dollar effort.
And we are talking about "ASIC proof" scrypt algortihm here. In my oppinion the memory related design made it even more easy to build an ASIC because you don't need a extreamly high specialized computing section but the right memory and this is what we've been working on.

Maybe this is not a ASIC in the sence that we placed every single transistor on our own but we assembled something that is definitely specialized on scrypt mining with useable success, so this can't be called a FGPA either.

I agree all this looks quite unorgnized at the moment. And you are right that we didn't prepare a bullet proof launch of all this but please give us some time to provide enough information before labelling us as scammers.
Nobody forces you to donate right away if you have doubts. Just wait before complaining about somethin you have no conception of yet.

Please read here: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=231221


That is absolutely true! We are doing all this alogside our jobs. Last year we were lucky and made good money with a single job and decided to concentrate an ASIC developement. Now that we were robbed we are working double fulltime again.
We will definitely build this ASICs no matter what. There is just the question left: will we do it as some kind of hobby or will we do this professionally launch a company?
Depending on donations this will take its time.

Tell us your oppinion!
You decide what kind of device we are building our chips into.

1. PCI-e device:
We are currently working with an PCI-e boad so this would be the design we would be able to finish the earliest.
This would be a devide in the size of a graphics card powered by a typical 6-Pin supply.
We assume to be able to build up to 16 Chips on one board that would give max. 80 MH/s at the current state of developement.
We would set up a product line with 4, 8 or 12 Chips so 40MH/s in average.

2. USB-Stick:
A portable solution limited by the USB power capacities. To make this one happen we need to shrink our chip design to reduce power consumtion. We are not sure this would result in any useable hashrate because the vital memory needs lots of power.

3. general USB device:
Maybe this is the most convenient design.
A Box you can put somewhere where it doesn't annoy you powered by external power supply and connectet to an ordinary PC via USB.
This devices could be scaled up to any ammount of chips and therefore any hashpower.

4. standalone rig:
This is the original design we planned to build for our own purposes.
We planned to build as many chips as possible as compact as possible into one single rig that you could mount into a typical 19 inch server rack. We are not sure what hashrate we would be able to reach with this design but it would be amazing, for sure.

In a nutshell: we designed and built an ASIC prototype for litecoin-mining but because of a thievery we need funding to proceed.

Who we are:
We are currently just three people having fun designing several hardware and software. For the last year we have been working on an ASIC device specialised on scrypt algorithm
and spending every cent and minute on this project.
We trusted in Litecoin since its very beginnings and knowing we couldn't compete in building Bitcoin ASICs any more we directly started working on Litecoin ASICs.
Since there are some clones like feathercoin lately getting popular using the same algorithm these devices would not be restricted to use with litecoin only.
To be honest we originally wanted to build ASIC devices for mining on our own but because of an very maddening incident we decided to "go public".
From now on we will be working on a device for selling to the community. A Website for preorders will come as soon as we are back in buisiness.

What did we achive yet:
We designed a board with one central computing chip supported by lots of high speed memory. This sounds quite simple but almost took a year to work out.
The board is currently connected to an ordinary PC via PCI-E extention and powered through external power supply.
We wrote our own mining software from scratch which still needs to be adapted to any hardware change and it has no official name jet.
The board is still quite large and not jet what you would call a "real ASIC". Power consumption is around 150W plus cooling and it spits out ~5000kH/s in average.
Of cause this is better than all available GPU based mining rigs but it is still no revolution jet.
This board was designed 2 months ago. In the mean time we went far ahead in design. Using new design and additionally shrinking the chip we expect to reduce power
consumption and heat production by at least a factor of ten for our next chip generation.
Im simulations we get a complete device using ~12W max.

What's our goal:
At the end we want to produce a device that could pay of itself roughtly within a few weeks asuming a worst case price of 2$/LTC.
The final type of device is still open for discussion. We planned to build a big multi chip rig but that might not be the kind of device for common selling.
It's up to your oppinion in which direction our further work is going. These are your options with hash estimation using todays state of design:
1. Internal PCI-e device to put into any ordinary PC. (~40 MH/s with a two slot large device)
2. External USB device powered through USB port (~3-5 MH/s)
3. External USB device powered through external supply (~mo limit on MH/s)
4. Standalone rig with optimal hash rate per size to connect directly to the network.
Here is a link to the poll:
http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=231199

What's our problem:
We are absolutely broke! Just two weeks ago we were four people. In March we found a chinese exchange student who seemed to be a very good programmer and invited him to join our project.
Lately he suddenly disappeared and took all our coin money which was around 100BTC and 7000LTC!!!
It turned out to be impossible to track him down because apparently he actually never was an exchange student and/or gave us a wrong name.
So here we are having a working ASIC prototype and lots of further concepts but no money to even pay for electricity.
And this is were your job begins: we need your donations to proceed.
PLEASE DON'T GET A WRONG IMPRESSION: All three of us are literally laboring fulltime and doing extra shifts any time possible right now.
But we still have some depts to pay of and this is were all our money is going right now.
As soon as we collected some backup money to pay for the next generation chip production we will proceed working on our ASIC device.
Any coin you are donating will speed things up.
As soon as possible we will again spend any available time in further hardware design.
Depending on your donations maybe one or two of us could start working fulltime in developement in the future.

Why should I donate:
1. You wan't to have scrypt ASICs available within this year.
We will keep working in our free time anyway, but we need to work a lot for money. Every tiny donation will buy us time and speed up the process. Do the math.
2. The amount of your donation will pay off when we start shipping. Every coin donated will be counted twice in your orders.
We decided not to offer any preorders, we will only take your money when we are ready for shipping so this should be some kind of replacement for that.
Donators will be identified by senders address and publicly listed in a separate thread (link with further details comming soon).

Just imagine me shaking my head...

4....

Yes it is and shouldn't bother anyone usually. But it sucks when you want to rush through this newbe restriction thing.
Besides we shouldn't use this as a chat. This is for collecting posts but apart from that you rather should call us.

There is a 360 sek cooldown for posts....WHY?

1.