First commercial ASIC miner specifications and pre-launch

[Xephan]

We received an offer from some chinese entrepreneurs. The fact that we manufacture in Guangzhou is not safe for us. Trade secret in China is non-existent, as well as respect for intellectual property. We will not reveal further details about the offers we receive. We did not expect orders to flood in but at least we did expect that the community would take this seriously.

The irony is that, if you really have the machine, by being so secretive about it, it would take you longer to find buyers. The longer it takes, the higher the chance that the Chinese factories you're working with, would start selling copies of the ASIC/machine if they believe there is a demand for it.

Like others have said, if an established member with the right knowledge can verify your claims, you will sell those 500 machines really really fast. There won't therefore be time for anybody to clone it.

[Dargo]

asicminer,

It sounds like your trade secrets, if you really have any, would be far safer with JoelKatz than they are with the Chinese manufacturer you are working with. Since the cat is already out of the bag with the manufacturer, I don't see how you are taking further risk by having the requested conversation with JoelKatz. Obviously I don't fully understand the situation, but going on what I know (or think I know), your actions seem a bit irrational.

Also, I'm wondering - are you in this purely for the profit? Or do you also value the long term viability of bitcoin as a decentralized form of currency? If the latter, I would think that being bought out by a group who plans to use your technology to set up a private mining cluster would be less attractive to you than making the technology publicly available. I realize that given the skeptical reaction on this board, you now have doubts that you can make a profit by selling your machines on the open market, but as others have already pointed out, if you can just work with us to give more verification, the orders will come.

[newMeat1]

The "45k logical gates" that he quoted sounds low to me by a factor of 7. I would expect about 300-400k logic elements to get 500 Mhash/s. But, seriously, thanks for providing a concrete number for us to look at.

Maybe you can answer this question: How do you provide DC power to the ASIC? Anybody could find a solution to this easily on digikey.com in 10 minutes, so you shouldn't mind releasing a bit of info. Just describe the parts as best you can if you won't give us part numbers.

I'll give you an example:
On my first FPGA prototype, I used an AC/DC plug-in adapter to convert the 110V 60Hz wall power to 3.3Vdc at the board. Then I used (2) LDO's to convert 3.3V to 1.2V.

[gigabytecoin]

This reeks of a scam.

The fact that they have not complied with JoelKatz simple request of "asking questions" makes me believe it is 100% Bullshit.

Do not put your money into this project. I am not doing so.

[Dargo]

They haven't even posted the blurry pics promised yesterday, though this could be due to having a buy-out offer if that claim had any truth to it.

[gigabytecoin]

They haven't even posted the blurry pics promised yesterday, though this could be due to having a buy-out offer if that claim had any truth to it.

Lol. Right. Because all of us are more than skeptical, somebody has surely approached them with a multi-million dollar buy offer.

[rikur]

Hmmh, having personally been in Kowloon (Nathan Road is the main road on the Kowloon part of Hong Kong), I was just wondering why someone would live in Kowloon and call his company Shenzhen electronics whatsoever.

Would be a lot cheaper to live in the PRC side instead of HK, no? On the other hand, Kowloon is a lovely place.

[fpgaminer]

*sigh* I have better things to do with my time than deal with this.  

My personal opinion:
Nothing indicates to me this is real. Until further notice, I do not advice purchasing this product.

We used fpga miner as a starting base to develop our design. When we said it is 'compact' we meant it fits into 45K gates.

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If you used the Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Mining project as your starting base, I am making you publicly legally aware that that project is covered entirely by the terms of the GNU General Public License. By using any part of the Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Mining project, you must conform to the legal obligations set forth in the GNU GPL. If you do not conform to the legal obligations set forth in the GNU GPL, you will be prosecuted in all applicable legal jurisdictions.
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our asic has 45K logical gates and gathers 500 Mhash\sec at 120MHz and one cycle per full-hash.

SHA-256, by its very nature, cannot be optimized.⁽¹⁾ The Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner uses 75K Altera Logic Elements to perform a full Bitcoin hash per clock cycle. This translates to somewhere between 225K gates and 975K gates. You say you get ~4 Bitcoin hashes per clock cycle from 45K gates. This is massively incorrect on your part.

(1) For curious parties, SHA-256 itself cannot be optimized. Optimization of SHA-256 is akin to an attack on the algorithm itself. You can, however, provide application specific implementations that exploit constant data in various ways. This applies to Bitcoin, as it does have some constant data fed into the hashing function, but only to a limited extent. The 75K Logic Elements figure I quoted above is already taking advantage of a good majority of these optimizations.

[phillipsjk]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----

Was going point out there was no easy way to get the original text for hash verification¹. Then I saw the unmutilated text quoted for my reply...

1: The board translates those [url] tags into HTML anchors.

[Xephan]

Hmmh, having personally been in Kowloon (Nathan Road is the main road on the Kowloon part of Hong Kong), I was just wondering why someone would live in Kowloon and call his company Shenzhen electronics whatsoever.

Would be a lot cheaper to live in the PRC side instead of HK, no? On the other hand, Kowloon is a lovely place.

From my work experience, it's not uncommon for companies to have their sales/admin office in HK and/or Taiwan but factories in Shenzhen and named in a variety of "illogical" ways. So that alone isn't damning evidence.

But getting publicly pwnz by fpgaminer however...

[makomk]

SHA-256, by its very nature, cannot be optimized.⁽¹⁾ The Open Source FPGA Bitcoin Miner uses 75K Altera Logic Elements to perform a full Bitcoin hash per clock cycle. This translates to somewhere between 225K gates and 975K gates. You say you get ~4 Bitcoin hashes per clock cycle from 45K gates. This is massively incorrect on your part.

Yeah, agreed. Even though I have no experience with ASIC design whatsoever, it's pretty obvious that 45K gates isn't nearly enough even for just the adders of a 1 hash per cycle design, let alone the rest of the logic required.

[grid]

This is a scam, you are guaranteed to lose your money.

fpgaminer's post basically summed up and closed the discussion, and we are doing the scammers a favor by keeping this thread alive.

I suggest that this thread is closed and buried until somebody comes clean with some proof.

[neotrino]

fpgaminer and what about shipping costs to Europe/US and customs taxes?

[CaptainDDL]

Interesting concept, but just a tad outside of my gambling price range.

[Dimsum]

The reason that people are so sceptical is because very little information is forthcoming. We understand that you want to protect your IP, but you won't get sales that way. You have to meet us half way and at the moment you are more secretive than North Koreas nuclear plans! Even I would be happy to purchase this, but its a big risk based on nothing substantial at the moment.

You also promised photos today - which have not turned up - hardly a convincing sign! I hope when they do turn up that they wont be Mr BlurryCam types!

[ttul]

Hi Everyone,

Interesting thread. Without making a judgement on asicminer, I wanted to let you know about LargeCoin if you aren't already aware of it. This is a new company I have founded with some computer engineering colleagues (both of whom have worked previously with a major semiconductor firm with a combined 25 years of experience in ASICs). We are not asking for deposits and won't make claims about performance until the chips are baked and tested. However, if you want to sign up for a low volume announcement mailing list, feel free to fill in a form at the following URL:

http://largecoin.com

A few facts about LargeCoin:

1. The founding team have a computer engineering background, with relevant experience in ASIC design and marketing with one of the leading semiconductor companies. The CEO has run two technology companies previous to LargeCoin and has experience raising private equity financing.

2. Our web site is not yet up, so don't bother checking largecoin.com - it's just an Apache default page.


3. The company's R&D is happening in Canada and we will likely remain incorporated in Canada. When the web site is up, we'll provide incorporation details for you to scrutinize if you wish.

4. We're working hard to release a Bitcoin mining appliance as fast as we can. The appliance will be optimized for spatial density and of course the ASIC will provide power efficiency. We are not taking deposits for appliances at this time and don't plan to. We are privately funded and don't expect customers to take on risk.

5. As the computational power of the Bitcoin network increases, we feel it's more important to optimize for spatial density and power efficiency than it is to provide the lowest possible cost per GHash/s. This means our appliances may be more costly on a GHash/s basis than GPUs; however, when you account for power and rackspace they will be substantially less expensive.

6. There is no release date yet - sorry about that. If you sign up for our announcement list, we'll let you know as soon as we have a ship date.

The only thing I wish for is to compress time so that we can get these things out to you all faster. But ASICs take time and there is a lot of uncertainty along the way that could stretch or compress our schedule.

[TeraPool]

Hi Everyone,

Interesting thread. Without making a judgement on asicminer, I wanted to let you know about LargeCoin if you aren't already aware of it. This is a new company I have founded with some computer engineering colleagues (both of whom have worked previously with a major semiconductor firm with a combined 25 years of experience in ASICs). We are not asking for deposits and won't make claims about performance until the chips are baked and tested. However, if you want to sign up for a low volume announcement mailing list, feel free to fill in a form at the following URL:

http://largecoin.com

A few facts about LargeCoin:

1. The founding team have a computer engineering background, with relevant experience in ASIC design and marketing with one of the leading semiconductor companies. The CEO has run two technology companies previous to LargeCoin and has experience raising private equity financing.

2. Our web site is not yet up, so don't bother checking largecoin.com - it's just an Apache default page.


3. The company's R&D is happening in Canada and we will likely remain incorporated in Canada. When the web site is up, we'll provide incorporation details for you to scrutinize if you wish.

4. We're working hard to release a Bitcoin mining appliance as fast as we can. The appliance will be optimized for spatial density and of course the ASIC will provide power efficiency. We are not taking deposits for appliances at this time and don't plan to. We are privately funded and don't expect customers to take on risk.

5. As the computational power of the Bitcoin network increases, we feel it's more important to optimize for spatial density and power efficiency than it is to provide the lowest possible cost per GHash/s. This means our appliances may be more costly on a GHash/s basis than GPUs; however, when you account for power and rackspace they will be substantially less expensive.

6. There is no release date yet - sorry about that. If you sign up for our announcement list, we'll let you know as soon as we have a ship date.

The only thing I wish for is to compress time so that we can get these things out to you all faster. But ASICs take time and there is a lot of uncertainty along the way that could stretch or compress our schedule.

Why is there no actual name associated with your domain name registration?

That is a sure way to get your domain name revoked.

[gnoll110]

Those claims sound funny to me.

Same dollars for a bit more Mh/s, on way less watts. It's the way less watts that sounds funny to me.

I guess we'll see. If its true, GPU mining follows CPU mining into history in a few months!

Bonus history lesson:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HMS_Dreadnought_(1906)

Her design so thoroughly eclipsed earlier types that subsequent battleships of all nations were generically known as "dreadnoughts" and older battleships disparaged as "pre-dreadnoughts". Her very short construction time was intended to demonstrate that Britain could build an unassailable lead in the new type of battleships. Her construction sparked off a naval arms race, and soon all major fleets were adding Dreadnought-like ships.

With this single act, the British undermined themselves. Obliterating their navel advantage at the time by making the existing fleet obsolescent. The problem wasn't the ability to build a complete new fleet, but the financial resource need to do it!

[ttul]

Why is there no actual name associated with your domain name registration?

That is a sure way to get your domain name revoked.

Thanks for pointing this out. We'll correct this with the domain registration.

[makomk]

Same dollars for a bit more Mh/s, on way less watts. It's the way less watts that sounds funny to me.

The only fishy thing about the power consumption figures I've seen for asicminer.net is that they're a bit high, if anything; you can get that kind of MHash/W with FPGAs in theory. It's all the other details of asicminer.net that scream scam.