As said in the OP, only 30,000 shares are put on the public market. Although and they are all gone, The bulk sales haven't been closed. Investors could buy from us before then instead of buying them from the public market.

10th Payment

Calculation time: August 15, 05:02:08 forum time

Number of difficulty change: 1
Number of block reward change: 0

Time interval:

  Starting from: August 8, 02:53:19
  Ending at: August 12, 11:47:26
  Total time: 377647
  Difficulty: 2,036,671.09

  Starting from: August 12, 11:47:26
  Ending at: August 15, 05:02:08
  Total time: 234882
  Difficulty: 2,190,865.97

Hashrate of this week: 1.27028MH/s

coupon/share = (1.27028*10^6)/(2^32)*(377647*50/2,036,671.09+234882*50/2,190,865.97)=0.0043275

Number of Shares: 5000

Total Payment: 21.6375

But we are not.

The fundraising thread is here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.0

There are more information, as well as question answered.

I would prefer that this Block Erupter thread will be mainly used to report the progress of the chips to the community, as well as discussion of technical problems in the future.

These factors all contribute to the inexpensive cost:
  1. 130nm node size. As the mainstream switches to 28nm, the 130nm existed for so long that even many smaller foundries could do it very well. The intense competition of manufacturing in China brings the price of everything down, including ICs. Though we chose the larger and more reliable foundry, their evaluation of the price of 130nm full-mask and MLM is still near the price in this main thread.
  2. MLM(Multi-Level-Mask). Compared to full-mask, this technology reduces the cost of mask-set to half with the exchange of increasing the margin cost by about 40%. This is a good deal for us because the margin cost of chips themselves is one of the lowest cost in our budget.
  3. Low EDA license fees and low labor cost in China.
  4. We ourselves did most of the RTL design, optimization and simulation.

The RTL is written in Verilog.
Frontend: We use VCS for simulation, Verdi for debugging, DC for synthesize.
Backend: We use ICC for P&R, Calibre for DRC/LVS check, virturso for layout merge, StarRCXT for RC extraction and PrimeTime for STA.

Formality is used to verify the netlist. We also do some simulation directly on the netlist but it is very slow compared to that on the RTL phase, so many possible cases of the state machine couldn't be covered. Formality is needed to increase the confidence of the synthesize results.

By models of the gates, I guess you mean technology libraries. They are provided by our foundry indirectly from the foundry agent.

The PLL IP module is also provided by them.

Please PM me with your e-mail address and ask for more documents and information if you feel necessary. Thanks.

Update

Since the fundraising thread was already made, I would prefer the discussion of more technical aspects in this thread. After all it's a sub-forum in the hardware board. But I will answer these questions:

We will offer our boards for sale, but that will be a stage after our self-mining. Because within that time we could polish our board design and contact potential partners of doing marketing, logistics and customer service for us.

1. We ourselves don't consider the portion of our own too high. Because the investors of ASICMINER will have the privilege of breaking even first and no future dilution. Also the market will tell us whether 0.1BTC per 1/400,000 of the company is overpriced or not.
2. It is hard to say if such a prediction is conservative or aggressive. It might be either much higher or lower than that depending on how the ASIC mining industry performs. And no one knows how many competitors are secretly lurking there besides those who have revealed themselves.
3. We may own less in the future, because when we further sell the shares of the company, we can only sell ours because, as we promised, ASICMINER shares are prone to no dilution.

Weekly Financial Disclosure

Time: 11:21 AM, Beijing time
Date: August 15, 2012

Funds of Last Week: 18.473BTC
Number of Total Shares in Circulation: 5000

Assets:

JLP-BMD
Holding: 1569shares 140.896BTC
Dividends Paid: 1.420BTC

YABMC
Holding: 1450shares 176.610BTC
Dividends Paid: 4.877BTC

PIMP
Holding: 1382shares 228.030BTC
Dividends Paid: 4.784BTC

MOVETO.FUND
Holding: 109shares 125.132BTC
Dividends Paid: 0.000BTC

BFLS
Holding: 50shares 100.000BTC
Dividends Paid: 0.926BTC

Cognitive
Holding: 184shares 125.102BTC
Dividends Paid: 0.352BTC

BDT
Holding: 91shares 98.271BTC
Dividends Paid: 2.610BTC

BTC
Holding: 101.374shares 101.374BTC
Holding After Dividends: 86.405BTC

Calculated Dividends: 1.420+4.877+4.784+0.000+0.926+0.352+2.610=14.969BTC
NAV: 140.896+176.610+228.030+125.132+100.000+125.102+98.271+101.374-14.969=1080.446BTC
Weekly NAV Growth: (1080.446-1062.054)/1062.054=1.73%

Update

The motion has been passed.

Voted Yea:3515
Voted Nay:0

So from this week, the new dividend structure will be taken.

According to our foundry, the rate of mask-set success with large die with MLM is the same with a standard full mask.

Larger die will indeed have less fault-tolerate rate, but 17mm^2 is not classified as the largest type processed by our foundry.

Our foundry is located in Shanghai, China. We have provided the confidential agreement between the agent of the foundry and us to some investors, and we will definitely provide our final contract to investors when it's made. Thanks.

In fact it's after ASICMINER investors' principle are paid back. Since it will almost definitely that the IPO will stop before 200,000 shares, prior return will be higher than 200% of what in the spreadsheet.

Update

Just to mention, since the IPO hasn't finished and bulk purchase at 0.1BTC/share with extra shares offering is still going on, it is not suggested to buy them at a very high price at this moment. Thanks.

We now have more than 2,000 BTC worth of shares executed as private bulk purchase and about 7,000 BTC worth of shares asked for reservation by potential investors.

So there are still some uncertainties but overall our IPO is doing well.

Thanks for your questions.

It's already taken into account. We provided the return rate based on a set of possible total network hashrates (therefore difficulties).
You could decide yourself which of them is most possible per month.

It may be feasible, but there are some more facts to consider:

1. When we begin to sell products to customers, limitlessly expansion will harm the buyers' motivation, hence the revenue via selling.
2. If may be better to keep the revenue for R&D of the next-generation of products than expand too much with the original technology, especially that we want to stay in the mining ASIC industry and help securing the network in the long run.

Update

A more detailed estimation about the return is shown online, based on the condition given in the main thread:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Al1fvFT7Sd5bdGppUktrYmlIZ3MwRUxhZTk0WEJBd1E

Currently it considers three variables:

1. The electricity fee. (0$/KWh and 0.1$/KWh)
2. The total hashrate of the whole network.
3. Block reward halving. (before and after)

More factors will be taken into consideration.

Thanks for you interest and questions. Would you please PM me your skype id and e-mail address so we could arrange the skype conference and send you the documents you require? Thanks.

Update

We collect more questions frequently asked by the community in the past several days here.

Q: What is your fundraising target? How do you decide whether this IPO succeeds or not?
A: The minimum target is 100k$. If the raised funds surpass this number, we will consider that our IPO is successful. However, we would like to raise more (120-140k$) because keeping the budget at minimum is very prone to unexpected scenarios.

Q: So you will send the extra shares at at time?
A: Yes.

Q: How do you achieve so low costs?
A: There are several factors.
  1. 130nm node size. As the mainstream switches to 28nm, the 130nm existed for so long that even many smaller foundries could do it very well. The intense competition of manufacturing in China brings the price of everything down, including ICs.
  2. MLM(Multi-Level-Mask). Compared to full-mask, this technology reduces the cost of mask-set to half with the exchange of increasing the margin cost by about 40%. This is a good deal for us because the margin cost of chips themselves is one of the lowest cost in our budget.
  3. Low EDA license fees and low labor cost in China.
  4. We ourselves did most of the RTL design, optimization and simulation.

Q: Why don't you use Bitfountain for your GLBSE ticker?
A: Because the ASICMINER shareholders (GLBSE investors) have an extra set of privileges upon Bitfountain shareholder (us).

Thanks for your questions.

We decided to use a different name from the start, because that the ASICMINER shareholders have an extra set of privileges upon Bitfountain shareholders (two of my partners and me).

Yes, it's insanely profitable given that all the given conditions will hold. But "we are first to the market" and the unchanged 15TH/s network hashrate after several months are both strong assumptions.

Before the investors break even, all net profits will be paid to them. So in the first week that's 5,000 BTC minus the electricity fee and place rent.

There are two kinds of failure rates.

The first one is the noise points in mass production. When we get the estimation of 12TH/s we already considered the noise points, or that will be more than 16TH/s on the unrealistic hypothesis that the production process is perfect.

The second one is the failure of making a workable mask-set. It means the waste of the major part of NRE cost. This is the largest risk here and investors should consider this seriously before being in.

The first time that MOORE get boosted will be with or a little after the deploying first batch of our chips. It's like bulk-selling of hashrates from Bitfountain to me myself (I as an individual, am fully responsible of MOORE). So there has to be an approval by shareholders.
Later, if we decide to use MOORE as a future hashrate selling engine, it also needs motion-based approvals.

If at that time, our competitors delivered their products, and the market price of ASIC-based hashrate on the GLBSE market is already settled, we will probably price MOORE at (evolved hashrate at that time with our formula of each share) * (BTC per MH/s) * 1.6. If we are the first to deliver our products, we have to do the price discovery ourselves and what in my mind is keeping the current price of 0.5BTC/share, push the hashrate to 50MH/s per dollar, and fix the hashrate per share based on the BTC/USD exchange rate at that time.

Thanks. Though some information will be only kept for board members, our progress and milestones will be updated to the public for anyone to see.

Answer to the first question is: our chips are made with I/O simplicity in mind, so there is nothing serious hampering the compatibility on future versions. But as you said, this stage is early and future compatibility is not on the highest priority when making choices.

The second one: We are not planning to disallow that.

There will be. There will also possibly be a small number of free devices for the community. But both needs to be approved with the motions by all shareholders.

Yes. We are making ASIC chips for Bitcoin mining purpose.

We will be selling the equipments, but are currently not accepting pre-orders.

We are a mining company as well. Since at least the first batch of chips, and probably more, will be consumed by us for self-mining. The investors will get both the profits from self-mining and device-selling.

Thanks for your question.

Actually not. One ASICMINER share represents 1/400,000 of the net profits from Bitfountain. Therefore the answer to this question:


will be that:

Investing in ASICMINER is investing in Bitfountain. No matter Bitfountain mines with its own hardware, sells its hardware/hashrates, or even expands its business domain, ASICMINER shareholders get all possible means of profits of Bitfountain proportionally.


This is the most significant problem here. There has to be a way for the board members or wider shareholders to monitor our financials and business operations. Representations could be sent by the board and do much of the job, and when we grow larger some professional auditing will be also very important. We will keep everything as transparent as enough with the help of our investors.