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=231199What'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).
