I'm pleased to announce our new security,
CIPHERMINE, listed on
Litecoin Global. CipherMine is a joint venture between leading British IT entrepreneur
Kate Craig-Wood (aka. woodtech), founder and CEO of
Memset, Giles Russel (aka. evilscoop) the man behind
EvilMiners, and two systems administrators at Memset.
Please view the security
here. We have completed both rounds of our IPO in astonishingly little time; the second at the higher price of 0.9LTC/share sold out even faster than the first found! We have now put all planned reserves (20,000 shares) on the market. Thank you to all our investors!
The latest version of the full business plan can be downloaded from
docs.ciphermine.com, an excerpt of which is below. Although we are quoted in LTC our principal operation will be SHA256 mining using ASICs and FPGAs.
Executive summaryCipherMine is a virtual cryptocoin mining business. All shares are listed on on the LTC Global exchange.
1.1 Goals- To provide a vehicle through which Litecoin (LTC) can be invested in mining cryptocoins.
- To give shareholders a high, reliable, long-term return on investment via regular dividends and equity growth.
- To aggressively invest in ASIC mining hardware to maximise early-mover advantage.
- To promote LTC and the LTC Global exchange as a good alternate to Bitcoin (BTC) and associated crypto-exchanges by being successful, and in doing so encourage a growth in value of LTC similar to BTC's.
- To operate in a sustainable and environmentally-friendly manner.
1.2 Strategy summaryCipherMine is already in operation, at present mining LTC with a combination of heavily discounted CPU resources and wholly owned GPU rigs. We wish to diversify into BTC mining and have an aggressive strategy of reinvestment in hardware. Although our models and discussion herein focus on LTC and BTC, we intend to apply our scrypt and SHA256 clusters to whichever coins are most profitable at any given time.
We have chosen LTC-Global since there is currently a dearth of mining companies on that exchange and because we believe that by being successful we can encourage LTC and LTC Global to become a main stream cryptocurrency and exchange with similar value explosions to that witnessed with BTC and shares on the BTC Trading Co exchange.
We shall invest 50% of profits back into hardware, as well as a 3-year straight-line amortisation / depreciation of existing hardware, and pay our 50% of profits as dividends. We have a detailed business model and forecast (available on request), the dividend forecast from which is shown in the figure 1.
The assumptions used (see detail below) are conservative. Most importantly, we assume that BTC mining productivity will decrease significantly due to difficulty increasing, and have based our difficulty forecast on the last two months trend. We also assume a fixed price for both LTC and BTC. Should they appreciate, as we expect, then our profitability will rise significantly. We shall be doing our accounting in Euros, not cryptocoins, though dividends will be in LTC.
1.3 Key strengths / differentiators and assets- An outstanding, publicly visible principal with a wealth of technical and business expertise, backed up by a superb team of professionals with demonstrable experience.
- A carefully considered, detailed and realistic business plan and model showing the growth potential.
- 750 Avalon SHA256/BTC-mining ASICs on order (~230 GH/sec, delivery lateJuly - early August).
- 100 SHA256/BTC-mining FPGAs on order (~24GH/sec, delivery late June).
- We have the following arrangements with Memset Ltd:
-
- Use of their ultra-efficient, high-security (to British government standards) data centre for which CipherMine will only be charged power at cost (and there is a lot of spare space).
- Use of the spare compute in their virtual machine estate with a minimal at-cost charge.
- The expectation that they will purchase end of life GPU rigs from CipherMine for use in their GPU cloud.
- Four quad-AMD 7950 GPU LTC mining rigs deployed (one mid-build).
- Cluster of 40 VMs LTC mining with Memset's spare compute (expandable).
- A proprietary, scalable software suite for the automation of mining workers as well as auto-selection of best value cryptocoin to mine and automatic conversion of alternate cryptocoins into LTC.
News24 Jun 2013: First 80 SHA256 FPGAs deliveredWe have recieved our first batch of 80 Ztex 1.15x clone SHA256-mining FPGA boards. Some pictures are below, apologies for the shakiness - was a phone camera! We've since packed them up for transport so not had a chance to take better ones, but will post more in a few days.
We are testing them in batches of 10 at present. Unfortunately we only have 10 mini USB cables due to a slow shipment, but according to Amazon they have been dispatched and will arrive in the next few days soon after which we will be able to get all 80 crunching on SHA256. We already have the necessary power cables and just need to rig up some fans (the little ones they came with are inadequate and we are removing them).
Each stack of 10 boards is producing 2.0 - 2.25 GH/s, so 16 - 18 GH/s in total (~0.44 BTC/day, or ~16 LTC/day with current conditions). Giles thinks we can coax a little more out of them with a firmware upgrade, some more overclocking and the aforementioned improved cooling arrangements.
Kate.
26th Jun 2013: Jan, Private pools, Diversification and PRDear All,
I have updated the CipherMine business plan to take into account recent developments. Please download version 1.05 from
docs.ciphermine.com. The pertinent changelog entry is pasted below. Three items are of particular note:
1) I am delighted to announce the addition of Jan Heinicke-Clemm (aka. JohnDorien on bitcointalk.org) to our team. Jan is a competent, multi-disciplinary IT specialist with skills in programming, systems administration and electronics engineering. In the near-term he will be helping me with software development, in particular putting up private pools (see section 5.1.8 ) for our alt-coin mining. Once this is complete the first tranche 500 shares will be released to him. The second 500 will be release on or before 15th August once we have verified his merit. Those shares are coming from my personal allocation so no-one is being diluted.
2) Today I had a conversation with my PR agent, Katie Olver, about CipherMine. She is extremely excited and thinks that with the interest around bitcoins at the moment she can get us coverage in national British newspapers. This is part of a strategy to raise awareness of the security in hopes of boosting share prices (see section 4.5) and making it easier to raise money in the future should we need to. It will also ultimately help our diversifications (see section 5.2). Katie is calling her journalist contacts tomorrow (PR people are always so impatient!
so there is a chance that things could get "interesting" in the next week or so.
If it does look likely that we're going to get some good coverage then I will be "forking" the busines plan to modify a couple of elements and removing previous versions. Please retain a copy of v1.05! It will remain available to shareholders via a mechanism yet to be determined.
Further, if you are a shareholder then please keep a close eye out for announcements in the coming week or two - we may need to act quickly and I will want to involve you.3) We have purchased BTC with the 15,667 LTC raised in the IPO rounds and have placed an order and paid for for an additional 2,500 Avalon ASICs with Steamboat. There will be more hardware purchases in the next few days. This should nor mean that we are ahead of plan (we assumed the IPO would take longer and the ASICs would be delivered later than the mid-August ETA).
Kate.
Changelog for release 1.05:- Added Jan (developer and electronics engineer).
- Added detail to R&D diversificaiton section.
- Expanded on software and mining pools section, including private pools plan.
- Updated staff shareholdings.
- Added preamble note to shareholder contract about successful IPO and how money is being spent.
- Added section 4.5 (marketing and press relations).
- NOTE: New hardware orders and timelines not yet put into the model - forecast should improve once done.
