By Havelock's rules, open trading does not begin until all rounds are closed or the offering deadline is reached.  It would defeat the purpose to even have rounds if we were to start open trading anytime before then.

Founders are also equity holders, as with IPO unitholders.  Our business is about equity growth and not purely a cash business like other offerings on Havelock.  The management needs to have the flexibility to determine how much cash get plowed back into the business to maximize equity value.  If you are more interested in dividend payments vs. equity growth, then this is not the right investment for you, nor if you cannot handle any intrinsic risk of investing in early stage startups.

Abram's prior experience with Hashfast although brief has been invaluable with regards to avoiding past mistakes in this industry, implementing proper business practices, and better understanding the market, and nothing to do with his other experiences whatsoever.

There's also a good chance that we can raise enough capital through large purchase deals that Round 2 does not need to be fully subscribed to be a viable business, in which case, Round 2 will stay open.  We are being conservative by not committing to something unless it's guaranteed.  Again, Round 1 investors will get the benefits of the low equity pricing albeit with higher risks.

Yes, of course.  If we complete Round 1, we will aggressively pursue other funding sources.  Typically it's the hardest to close the first round -- investors don't like to feel alone.  There is definitely a risk of not being able to complete the funding to cover NRE, which is built into the price discount, however, remember that Round 1 investors also get highest liquidation preferences if we were to sell our IP assets.

Let me clarify the terms.

In the event that Round 1 does not fully close, all Round 1 investors will receive a refund on their total investment.

In the event that Round 2 does not fully close, all Round 2 investors will receive a full refund on their investment.  However, Round 1 investors will not receive a refund since this capital will have been used to pay our vendors for services rendered, hence the deeper discount from Round 2.

In the event that Round 3 does not fully close, no refund will be offered to any investors, as we will be a viable business.  We are currently working with large clients on product deals that do not involve raising money on Havelock, as well as funded by preorder from our website and bridge loan financing.  Havelock serves as a supplement funding source for non-US investors for our core strategy of pre-selling to large industrial customers.

Also, Founder shares cannot be traded or receive any dividend payments until all previous investors are paid back in full, starting with Round 1, 2, etc.  These terms incentivize us to generate enough profits to fully pay back our investors before we receive any profit distributions.  We are fully committed to building a long-term viable business and hence have structured the terms in such a way for us to do so.

Sorry for the confusion and hope this clarifies things.

-Paul

all good points.  Since launching in March, we've revisited and changed our product strategy.

Gridseed, we consider the 1st generation of Scrypt ASIC, as they were 1st to market.  As for InnoSilicon and Zeus, who are both China-based and already in the market with 7 and 12.5 W/MHs chips respectively, they do have a couple months of market lead, but eventually be replaced by more power efficient chips. sub 4W/MHs, as evident in the Bitcoin ASIC space. 

For Scrypt-N, Scryptr mines at 1.6MH/s for N=2048 and degrades about 33% for every step-up in N factor.  The next increase for Vertcoin is not until 2/25/16.

jimmothy,

Currently, our business is focused on the industrial-scale miners, hence we only offer chips and boards.  Because we offer boards with many different interfaces, the PCIe card is also suitable for the consumer market, where we believe preorders give us a way to allow those interested to get early access to the hardware and also gauge market demand for our products in the consumer space.  We understand the sensitivity around pre-orders in the consumer market and hence are not actively promoting any pre-sales.

-Paul

We’re happy to announce a successful FPGA demo of our Scrypt ASIC, which will be available in August 2014.  The FPGA prototype is a key step in our chip design verification and helps to confirm that our design works as expected.  Also, it provides us critical insights into the actual performance of the real silicon before the chip is fabricated.

Setup:
We used a Wandboard Quad Freescale development board to control the Kintex-7 FPGA board via a wired SPI connection soldered to both boards.  The Wandboard is running Ubuntu Linux and loaded with our device drivers for CPUMiner.  For the demo, we started CPUMiner with the option to connect to a dedicated Scrypt mining pool with a low hashrate (~4MH/s) using a worker (fpga) in order to show earned shares in a reasonable amount of time, given that the FPGA hash rate is very low. 

Results:
We achieved a hash rate of around 3.91kH/s on the FPGA.  Since our FPGA is programmed with 1% of the number of cores and running at 1/12 the targeted clock frequency, the actual chip performance will be around 1,200x or around 4.7MH/s!  We were also able to successfully mine about 188 shares during the 1.5 hours of setting up and filming.  The payout will not be reflected in our account until the pool finds a valid block, which was about 3 days ago.

Overall, this test was a huge success and a key milestone for taping out and getting our design to production.  Please visit our website (www.blissdevices.com) to pre-order the Neon mining card which will feature 8 ASICs and deliver 37MH/s of hashing performance @ 180W.

See our video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLrQ40qUegg

--Team Bliss

dabs, we're all for trusted community members reviewing our products and will be in contact shortly after we're closer to having a prototype.  We also plan to launch an affiliate program that may be of interest as well.

I did not make this post to stir up resentment, nor was it my intention to offer you false promises.  Our business is not built solely on collecting pre-order, rather it's a way for potential customers to get in line early -- the choice is yours.  Again, we have deep experience in chip design, operational experience, as well as team members who have worked in the Bitcoin mining space, and our goal is to build and deliver the best products to market.

Couldn't agree more.  Unfortunately that's the risk you take to get product early and potentially get higher ROI.  Wish it could be different!

Hi everyone,

It’s been a crazy 48 hours. On Tuesday March 18th, we officially announced the launch of our Neon series of Scrypt-based currency miners. At the time, we spec’ed our systems to outperform the miners from Alpha Technology with twice the amount of hashing power at 50% the energy consumption per kH, which was the best offering on the market.

Yesterday, we learned that KnC was launching Titan, a Scrypt miner with aggressive performance at an attractive price point.  Although Titan cannot mine Scrypt-N currencies such Vertcoin and other ‘ASIC resistant’ coins nor optimize which currency is being mined at the hardware level as with our Neon miners, we were impressed nonetheless. The KnC team comprise of very talented guys with a respected track record.  Thus, we went back to the whiteboard with a big pot of coffee and thought hard about how we could further improve our product offering.

We figured it out.

With some changes to our PCB boards (full-length vs. half-length cards) and stuffing more boards into the existing chassis, we effectively doubled the hashing power of each model.  We decided rename the models to avoid confusion and all the while, keeping prices the same! Everyone who purchased our miners in the past couple days has been automatically upgraded to the larger models.

We are really excited to share more details about Neon, as we plan to be more active in the cryptocurrency community so you should start seeing us more at tradeshows, meetups, and very soon hosting Google Hangout sessions.

Here are our revised specs:  You can also view them here: http://blissdevices.com/shop

Neon C08: PCIe Card
    Performance: 8MH/s
    Power cons:   40W
    Price:            $1,440

Neon M32: Stand-alone Box
    Performance: 32MH/s
    Power cons:   300W
    Price:            $5,400

Neon M100: 4U rack-mountable Chassis unit
    Performance: 100MH/s
    Power cons:   800W
    Price:            $14,400

We will continue to do everything possible to be competitive and keep our customers happy! If you have any questions or would just like to chat, feel free to reach me at pc@blissdevices.com, as we understand how important it is to earn the trust of the community.

Paul Chen
CEO of Bliss Devices

Actual hardware photos cannot be provided at this time since we do not yet have product (else we would be shipping!).  The longest bottleneck in the production cycle is the ASIC itself, not the hardware, which is all off-the-shelf and drastically reduces the risk of inventory shortages.  A PCB board cannot be fab'ed without knowing the entire chip specs, else it would be worthless.  That process itself is fairly standard in our case since we do not have extreme power requirements (a standard 4 layer board will do) as with Bitcoin ASICs.

The power numbers came from our backend vendor, a reliable Taiwanese firm who has also had experience in taping out Bitcoin chips, which we will be announcing soon through a press release.  In fact, the estimates were even lower, but again we would rather be a bit more conservative than overpromise.

Due to increased regulation and digital currency as a potential threat to its market, banks have made it exceptionally hard for cryptocurrency mining hardware startups to accept payments by credit card and will even shut down corporate accounts, so that's why you'll notice why many other companies in our space do not accept credit cards either. That said, we strongly believe cryptocurrency is the future and are doing our part to pave the way to making this happen for everyone.

If any of you are in the Bay Area, I will be at this cryptocurrency event tonight, https://www.facebook.com/events/510990199010548, and would be more than happy to meet and answer any questions regarding the product or our current progress.

You guys are definitely right in pointing out that the product photo is not in fact an actual finished product photo, otherwise we would be shipping now.  In our rush to launch our website quickly, we tried to select an existing product that most resembles our final product, which apparently was a big mistake.  That said, our Neon16/Neon50 are actual product photos from our hardware system supplier.  We are currently moving as fast as we can to finalize our chip design by month end, so that we can start PCB design and fab a prototype board.

Again, our team has had deep experience designing ASIC (http://blissdevices.com/about-our-team, www.linkedin.com/in/pchen408) and are 100% focused on getting the chip to production.  In the future, we will be careful not to provide any misleading product photos.

Hi everyone,

Bliss Devices is happy to announce that we’re now accepting orders for our Neon series of 28nm Scrypt-based currency mining hardware. With Neon, you can mine any of the Scrypt-based currencies. Our proprietary software algorithm continually optimizes at the hardware level to ensure that you’re always mining the most profitable coins!

Who we are

The Bliss Devices team has successfully taped out over 8 generations of security ASICs for Fortinet, a leading network security company, and managed chip production to demanding customers such as Samsung and LG.

You can learn more about our team here: http://blissdevices.com/about-our-team.

The Neon Product Line

Neon C04: PCIe Card
   Performance: 4MH/s
   Power:          25W
   Price:            $1,440

Neon M16: Stand-alone Box
   Performance: 16MH/s
   Power:          175W
   Price:            $5,400

Neon M50: 4U Rack-mountable Chassis
   Performance: 50MH/s
   Power:          400W
   Price:            $14,400

Learn more about our miners here: http://blissdevices.com/scrypt.

Flexibility - Optimized mining

With Bitcoin mining hardware, you are tied to the profitability in mining one currency. With Neon, you can mine any of the Scrypt-based currencies. Neon supports configurable parameters, so you can even mine adaptive N-factor Scrypt currencies like Vertcoin. Our proprietary software algorithm optimizes your mining to ensure that you’re always mining the most profitable coins.

Learn more about why you should be mining Scrypt coins here: http://blissdevices.com/scrypt.

Purchase details

- First batch is a limited run. We will only be selling:
1,000 C04 PCIe cards
100 M16 stand-alone units
300 M50 4U rack-mountable units

- We accept payment via:
BTC/LTC (using GoCoin)
Wire transfer
ACH (using Bluepay)

- Orders will be shipped in the order in which they are received.

Ship dates

- C04 orders begin shipping on 10/30/14.
- M16 and M50 units start shipping on 11/10/14.

Purchase with confidence

We’ve conservatively set ship dates that we’re confident we’ll beat. We offer a full refund if orders are not shipped within 30 days of the quoted ship date and we will make bi-weekly production announcements to keep you posted on our progress.

Buy your Neon Now!

Please visit our online store here: http://blissdevices.com/scrypt.

Use promo code “bitcointalk” at checkout and receive a 3% discount through the end of March!

- Team Bliss