[LABCOIN] IPO [BTCT.CO] - Details/FAQ and Discussion (ASIC dev/sales/mining)

[MonkeyMarcel]

Interested.

[twentyseventy]

I am assisting Sam and the Labcoin team in the IPO, and yes. We will most likely give people a few days advance notice before IPO is released on BTCT.CO both in this thread and a separate IPO thread under /securities

I am just wondering why Labcoin doesn't officially announce that you are the assistant of their company.
Sorry for my concern.

He's right in the prospectus:

About Labcoin

Reference staff and contacts

Fabrizio Tatti

- Founder and sole owner of iTec-pro Ltd

- Brief CV : http://cn.linkedin.com/in/fabriziotatti


Samuel Noi

- Nominee Director of iTec-Pro Ltd and PR representative for Labcoin.


Howard Wang

- Team Leader at Research Institute of Tsinghua University in Shenzhen

- Master's, Electronic Science and Technology Tsinghua University in Integrated Circuits & Systems

- Bachelor's, Electronic and Information Engineering Beijing University Aeronautics and Astronautics


Michael Sparmann (theSeven)

- Bitcoin expert, contributor for Open-Source FPGA Bitcoin miner

- Generalist software developer, touched most layers from electronics to web development

- Background on low level software (down to the hardware interface, bare-metal software, operating systems, kernel, etc.
 

Daniel Larsson (TheSwede75)

- Marketer, member of Bitcointalk, group-buy manager and bitcoin enthusiast. Acting as communications assistant with Labcoin.com in IPO and marketing.

[TheSwede75]

I think at least 24 hours notice would be good as well.

Be aware, the IPO will take 7000 Bitcoin. I doubt this will happen "within a very short timeframe".

We are just trying to be fair and allow as many people as possible the opportunity to invest if they wish. We have already had a fairly large amount of requests/questions from investors interested in fairly large purchases so we don't hold option as impossible the IPO will fill quickly.

[TheSwede75]

In another thread Labcoin they would be giving away free USB miners in August - https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=241033.msg2562535#msg2562535

I will be watching to see if Labcoin are a man of their word.

The production schedule is slightly delayed since the IPO and our move from 180nm to 130nm but we do still intend to offer prototypes as soon as possible for the forum to verify.

[TheSwede75]

200 btc is a lot for a board seat (not unreasonable though) AM's board seats were at like $6k

Absolutely true, but that was when bitcoin was valued far lower. Today a board seat (of course due to vast increase in ASICMINER valuation as well) would be around $1.8 million..

[matuszed]

200 btc is a lot for a board seat (not unreasonable though) AM's board seats were at like $6k

Absolutely true, but that was when bitcoin was valued far lower. Today a board seat (of course due to vast increase in ASICMINER valuation as well) would be around $1.8 million..

Would the board seats, and shares for them, be purchased off BTCT by any chance or is everything going through the exchange.

[TheSwede75]

200 btc is a lot for a board seat (not unreasonable though) AM's board seats were at like $6k

Absolutely true, but that was when bitcoin was valued far lower. Today a board seat (of course due to vast increase in ASICMINER valuation as well) would be around $1.8 million..

Would the board seats, and shares for them, be purchased off BTCT by any chance or is everything going through the exchange.

I think the solution to "off exchange sales" (as adviced by Burnside) is for larger share holders (and if we decide to announce board seats, the holders of them as well) to request verification of their ownership through Sam or Myself and simply use the BTCT.CO transfer system for share transactions. We MAY allow for transfer -out of shares and creation of "direct shares" but in the interest of time this is not something we will do before the IPO.

Worth noting is also that any larger share holder can use their shares to back new securities such as is the case for both ASICMINER PT and the TAT.ASICIMNER shares.

Short answer though: Most likely, if we make board seats available they would be purchased through BTCT.CO as all 10 million shares are registered with BTCT.CO and in the interest of transparency we would want this to remain the case.

[ThickAsThieves]

Couldn't this just be an Avalon chip order with lipstick?

Your tech and pricing for chips is no better, and too late, no?

What am I missing?

[Mabsark]

Couldn't this just be an Avalon chip order with lipstick?

Your tech and pricing for chips is no better, and too late, no?

What am I missing?

Labcoin's chip runs at 4.7 GH/s @ 2.7W per Gh/s for 9-10 USD.
Avalon's chip runs at 282 Mh/s @ 6.6W per Gh/s for 7.8 USD @ 100 USD/BTC.

Labcoin's chip seems superior to me.

[TheSwede75]

Couldn't this just be an Avalon chip order with lipstick?

Your tech and pricing for chips is no better, and too late, no?

What am I missing?

Though we use 130 nm technology our chips run at 4.5-5.0 GH/s per chip and have an estimated sale price of under $10. With lead time to volume orders of around 45-60 days (may be a lot less, I just don't want to make promises without hard facts from foundry) I believe that is quite a bit more attractive then Avalon chips for miner building, mining and DIY.

Also, and not to criticize Avalon but from what it seems, their "9-10 weeks" delivery time from order seems to have yielded very few chips to date, even from customers that ordered in April.

We are also making good progress on our 65nm chip development, that will bring far more effective chips to market.

Even though our generation 1 chip line is not a "revolution" in ASIC, we estimate them to sell very well and be quite profitable for our own mining operation.

[HuLaN]

Couldn't this just be an Avalon chip order with lipstick?

Your tech and pricing for chips is no better, and too late, no?

What am I missing?

Though we use 130 nm technology our chips run at 4.5-5.0 GH/s per chip and have an estimated sale price of under $10. With lead time to volume orders of around 45-60 days (may be a lot less, I just don't want to make promises without hard facts from foundry) I believe that is quite a bit more attractive then Avalon chips for miner building, mining and DIY.

Also, and not to criticize Avalon but from what it seems, their "9-10 weeks" delivery time from order seems to have yielded very few chips to date, even from customers that ordered in April.

We are also making good progress on our 65nm chip development, that will bring far more effective chips to market.

Even though our generation 1 chip line is not a "revolution" in ASIC, we estimate them to sell very well and be quite profitable for our own mining operation.

From a potential investors point of view, can you explain the difference between your 130nm technology chip compared to Avalon, ASICMiner and BTCGARDEN (?) 130nm technology that makes your chip more then 10x efficient? "Multi core"? Better RTL design?

[LordMeowMeow]

I think at least 24 hours notice would be good as well.

+1
Notice would be nice for everyone!

[TheSwede75]

Couldn't this just be an Avalon chip order with lipstick?

Your tech and pricing for chips is no better, and too late, no?

What am I missing?

Though we use 130 nm technology our chips run at 4.5-5.0 GH/s per chip and have an estimated sale price of under $10. With lead time to volume orders of around 45-60 days (may be a lot less, I just don't want to make promises without hard facts from foundry) I believe that is quite a bit more attractive then Avalon chips for miner building, mining and DIY.

Also, and not to criticize Avalon but from what it seems, their "9-10 weeks" delivery time from order seems to have yielded very few chips to date, even from customers that ordered in April.

We are also making good progress on our 65nm chip development, that will bring far more effective chips to market.

Even though our generation 1 chip line is not a "revolution" in ASIC, we estimate them to sell very well and be quite profitable for our own mining operation.

From a potential investors point of view, can you explain the difference between your 130nm technology chip compared to Avalon, ASICMiner and BTCGARDEN (?) 130nm technology that makes your chip more then 10x efficient? "Multi core"? Better RTL design?

I would say that it is a combination of both the multi-core approach and a different design approach. The labcoin chip also isn't '10x as effective' at all. The designers have just managed to consolidate many hashing cores in one chip effectively. As you can tell, Watt/GH is still not terribly effective, but we consider this to be of less concern for our 1st gen.

Parallel with the 130 nm production labcoin is (and have for some time) working on the 65 nm 2nd generation chips that will be more efficient, powerful and competitive with next gen ASIC.

One can also point out that the Avalon chip design is now almost a year old, and pretty big advances has been made since they started their ASIC design process. The reason they can still produce chips at high profit is the large series they run. As for BTCgarden I just don't know enough about their chips to make an educated statement.

[Vbs]

A 130nm chip at 4.5-5GH/s with that power draw?

So, an 110nm avalon chip is 282MH/s, but you guys somehow can create a chip with bigger transistors (130nm) that is equivalent to 16-17 avalon chips?

Not only that, but you claim you've optimized the logic so much that any competing chips using similar die-sizes are left in the dust?

Size of chip die area? Operating frequency? Number of cores?

Sorry, too many red flags in the key technical aspects.

[TheSwede75]

A 130nm chip at 4.5-5GH/s with that power draw?

So, an 110nm avalon chip is 282MH/s, but you guys somehow can create a chip with bigger transistors (130nm) that is equivalent to 16-17 avalon chips?

Not only that, but you claim you've optimized the logic so much that any competing chips using similar die-sizes are left in the dust?

Size of chip die area? Operating frequency? Number of cores?

Sorry, too many red flags in the key technical aspects.

I am unfortunately not a ASIC developer (or even engineer) myself, you can read more about the chip design in the hardware forum thread @ https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=241033.0
and if you have more questions I am happy to forward them to the development team.

What I can say is that nm density is a very small part of chip design and higher density does by no means automatically mean higher frequency or better efficiency.

[TheSwede75]

REGARDING: BOARD SEATS

I believe we have decided that we will be selling a form of 'Board Seats'. A board seat share holder will be any share holder that owns 200.000 shares at any point. If the ownership falls below 200.000 shares the owner will no longer be considered a 'board seat' owner.

We are still working out details regarding the type of project involvement and information flow board seat owners will be entitled to, but I figured I should release this information as soon as I could. IMPORTANT: We do not encourage people to purchase large blocks of shares for the sole purpose of reselling or as purely a 'status symbol'. Board seat owners will not be required to take part in any decision process or contribute any knowledge to the project but we encourage board seat investors to work with the Labcoin team in developing our product, marketing and plan the future of Labcoin.com

More information regarding 'Board Seats' will be made available soon. I am currently at around 90% that board seats will be instated but do NOT purchase shares solely for this purpose.

To become a board seat owner an investor need only purchase a total of 200.000 shares or more through BTCT.CO. No private sales will be made, and at no point will we allow manipulation or exemption from the BTCT.CO rules or our pre-set total share amount of 10.000.000

[superduh]

i don't know if this has been addressed yet.
it appears that labcoin is focused mostly on sales and talks about the possibility of mining.
can this be elaborated on.

[Mabsark]

Has there been a public demonstration of the chip?

[KCBitcoin]

Has there been a public demonstration of the chip?

+1, I wanted to ask the same question.

[Moebius327]

i don't know if this has been addressed yet.
it appears that labcoin is focused mostly on sales and talks about the possibility of mining.
can this be elaborated on.

I second this.