[Active Mining] The UNofficial Active Mining Discussion Thread [UNmoderated]

[Duffer1]

Entropy we know* that the price on Crypto-Trade is unreal. Like an actually unreal price point that we won't be seeing anytime soon, if at all. Trying to convince the main people who try to pump the price isn't really a good use of time or effort.

No one is going to buy a share for over .0005, and I will not be putting up bids (if any) till we go down to .00005 or .00007 as I think this is a reasonable place for me to get in more than I have. Now I know this is overvalued in your opinion but I am factoring in the chance that this company my succeed, and the spare BTC I have laying around due to the lack of other stuff to do with them.

You keep them.  How is that even a decision you need to think about?  Please.  I'm begging you, you've made me beg.  Keep them.

[1715420827]

1715420827

[JoTheKhan]

Entropy we know* that the price on Crypto-Trade is unreal. Like an actually unreal price point that we won't be seeing anytime soon, if at all. Trying to convince the main people who try to pump the price isn't really a good use of time or effort.

No one is going to buy a share for over .0005, and I will not be putting up bids (if any) till we go down to .00005 or .00007 as I think this is a reasonable place for me to get in more than I have. Now I know this is overvalued in your opinion but I am factoring in the chance that this company my succeed, and the spare BTC I have laying around due to the lack of other stuff to do with them.

You keep them.  How is that even a decision you need to think about?  Please.  I'm begging you, you've made me beg.  Keep them.

I have and I've invested early and have made my ROI way back when the price went from $100 to $200, I pulled out my initial investment. I am completely up. I have kept them, I haven't dropped them in a bunch other securities looking for a quick return. I'm not saying I will throw all my BTC into ActiveMiner. I'm not someone sitting on 100k Shares or anything. I have minimal shares in ActiveMining and I'm not against getting a few more for a very very low price.

EDIT: I do want to thank you though, I'm truly happy you are worrying about me like that.

[wasubii]

Cross posting this in case Ken deletes it from the other thread:

Hi Ken,

I would appreciate it if you could address these questions in your next update. Thanks

1) What is the estimated $ per GH costs for the full deployment of the 55nm chips. This includes (but not limited to) chip cost, board cost, controller cost, set up costs, coding costs, rent, power, staffing, security etc.

2) What were the fixed costs for the 55nm chip. This includes (but not limited to) IP costs from the two new engineers (monetary or otherwise), NRE costs for the tapeout, fixed design costs for boards (if not amortised into the per unit deployment cost in Q1).

3) What are the limits (if any) to the space/power available in our chosen data centre.

Regards,
wasubii

These questions if answered would help the competition, don't you think?

Hi Ken,

I am afraid i have to respectfully disagree. What could the competition do given that information?

The fact is, that everyone who is mining is doing everything they can to get as much hash online as possible - information from us as to what we are doing will not help or hinder them in that respect.

Or perhaps i am missing something?

How do you think they could use that information for their benefit or our detriment?

Regards,
wasubii

I think any information about what are cost are would not be good to release.  I don't know how they would use the information; however, if they don't have it, then I don't have to worry about how they would use it.

Hi Ken,

Thanks for your reply

I would argue that the answers to those questions above should be known to shareholders, both current and future. The future performance of the company hinges on this information and it doesn't fall under any type of NDA as far as i can tell.

If a competitor was thinking about copying what we were doing they could easy go out and get quotations for a 55nm mask, controller boards, mounting costs, hosting costs etc. I don't see how revealing these figures could possibly damage ActM, but conversely, i believe that releasing them would improve perceived transparency (something you are not known for) and boost investor confidence. You have already given the W per GH/s figures for the 55nm chips, you have also hinted at the level of our electricity costs (although as per usual you worded it very freely - much like your 'we have shipped products'). Why not release the rest of the information?

Your argument above is a weak one - this is a publicly traded company and shareholders expect to be given key information - i believe the answers to the questions above fall within the realm of information that should be released to the shareholders.

I for one am doubting that the 55nm chips are going to ROI after you take into account the IP costs, mask set and crucially, the deployment costs.

However, if the 55nm IP from the two new engineers is also the basis for the new fully custom 28nm chips, then the IP costs would figure into the ROI calculation for the 28nm chips as well - which gives a much better picture for the 55nm chips because the costs are spread out over both types of chips.

I understand that you prefer to not release any information at all - to date you have been incredibly secretive and in my opinion, that has damaged both your personal reputation and that of the company. In this new field of unlicensed, unregulated BTC securities there seems to be little shareholders can do to hold you to account - hence the endless jumping up and down and shouting on the thread.

I beg you to reconsider your stance on answering the above three questions - i really think it is in everyone best interests for you to be more open with us shareholders.

Regards
wasubii

Expect a good update tomorrow.

[Entropy-uc]

Cross posting this in case Ken deletes it from the other thread:

Hi Ken,

I would appreciate it if you could address these questions in your next update. Thanks

1) What is the estimated $ per GH costs for the full deployment of the 55nm chips. This includes (but not limited to) chip cost, board cost, controller cost, set up costs, coding costs, rent, power, staffing, security etc.

2) What were the fixed costs for the 55nm chip. This includes (but not limited to) IP costs from the two new engineers (monetary or otherwise), NRE costs for the tapeout, fixed design costs for boards (if not amortised into the per unit deployment cost in Q1).

3) What are the limits (if any) to the space/power available in our chosen data centre.

Regards,
wasubii

These questions if answered would help the competition, don't you think?

Hi Ken,

I am afraid i have to respectfully disagree. What could the competition do given that information?

The fact is, that everyone who is mining is doing everything they can to get as much hash online as possible - information from us as to what we are doing will not help or hinder them in that respect.

Or perhaps i am missing something?

How do you think they could use that information for their benefit or our detriment?

Regards,
wasubii

I think any information about what are cost are would not be good to release.  I don't know how they would use the information; however, if they don't have it, then I don't have to worry about how they would use it.

Hi Ken,

Thanks for your reply

I would argue that the answers to those questions above should be known to shareholders, both current and future. The future performance of the company hinges on this information and it doesn't fall under any type of NDA as far as i can tell.

If a competitor was thinking about copying what we were doing they could easy go out and get quotations for a 55nm mask, controller boards, mounting costs, hosting costs etc. I don't see how revealing these figures could possibly damage ActM, but conversely, i believe that releasing them would improve perceived transparency (something you are not known for) and boost investor confidence. You have already given the W per GH/s figures for the 55nm chips, you have also hinted at the level of our electricity costs (although as per usual you worded it very freely - much like your 'we have shipped products'). Why not release the rest of the information?

Your argument above is a weak one - this is a publicly traded company and shareholders expect to be given key information - i believe the answers to the questions above fall within the realm of information that should be released to the shareholders.

I for one am doubting that the 55nm chips are going to ROI after you take into account the IP costs, mask set and crucially, the deployment costs.

However, if the 55nm IP from the two new engineers is also the basis for the new fully custom 28nm chips, then the IP costs would figure into the ROI calculation for the 28nm chips as well - which gives a much better picture for the 55nm chips because the costs are spread out over both types of chips.

I understand that you prefer to not release any information at all - to date you have been incredibly secretive and in my opinion, that has damaged both your personal reputation and that of the company. In this new field of unlicensed, unregulated BTC securities there seems to be little shareholders can do to hold you to account - hence the endless jumping up and down and shouting on the thread.

I beg you to reconsider your stance on answering the above three questions - i really think it is in everyone best interests for you to be more open with us shareholders.

Regards
wasubii

Expect a good update tomorrow.

He is never going to answer because the truth is that it will cost more per Gh/s to manufacture 55 nm that you could buy 28 nm hardware from the existing suppliers. 

Whatever was paid for the 55 nm design and taping out out was literally the equivalent of piling the money up and burning it.

[Entropy-uc]

There's a huge red flag here in Ken's latest posting for anyone who actually thinks he is serious about delivering 1-2 Ph/s in Q2 of this year.  He says "getting us on the February run at UMC".  In a fab wafer starts happen every day.  A fully operational fab runs ~20000 or more wafers per month in lots of 25 wafers.  For a normal start there is no particular 'run' to catch, and certainly no monthly run.  There is one type of operation that does happen on a monthly basis; shuttle runs.

A shuttle a wafer build with shared mask space.  Your design is put on the masks along with many other people's in order to reduce costs and risk when testing if your design works.  It's a way of test driving your design without the huge risk of paying for a full mask set.  But, in exchange you only get a few hundred test chips for evaluation.

So, if that is what Ken is doing, he would get a couple hundred chips at the end of April and be able to use them to validate his design.  If they worked, it would take another 60-90 days before a full mask set could be built a wafers could be completed to produce anything more than a couple Th/s of devices.

... After the program verifies your shares, we will send a list of verified shareholders to CT, where they will create the account if not already created and add the verified number of shares to the account.

So you haven't even started the process yet?

Yes, I have been working on it for awhile; however, the trip to the west coast to get the 55nm chip, working with eASIC to change to a custom 28nm chip, getting us on the February run at UMC so that we could have chips in mid april has been my priority this month.   

[wasubii]

Ken very rarely gives figures and information so i don't take the below quote lightly...

Maybe you are reading into his wording too much Entropy

Update on trading and wafers:

It is going to be a few more days before, I can get the verifying program uploaded to the server.

I have been busy getting on the February UMC production run for our 55nm chip.

We are going to get 6 Wafer in the middle of April with about 1 week to package the chips.  Based on our estimated yield of 6,800 chips per wafer this give us 40,800 chips for a total hash rate of  77.52 TH/s.  Next we are going to receive 19 wafers by the end of April for a total of 245.48 TH/s, giving us 323 TH/s.  In May we will be able to get all of the wafers we want to run.

[Duffer1]

Ken very rarely gives figures and information...

I would take that as a huge red flag as well.

[wasubii]

Ken very rarely gives figures and information...

I would take that as a huge red flag as well.

We do. But not much anyone can do about it with our shares having been suspended for months...

[Entropy-uc]

Ken very rarely gives figures and information so i don't take the below quote lightly...

Maybe you are reading into his wording too much Entropy

Update on trading and wafers:

It is going to be a few more days before, I can get the verifying program uploaded to the server.

I have been busy getting on the February UMC production run for our 55nm chip.

We are going to get 6 Wafer in the middle of April with about 1 week to package the chips.  Based on our estimated yield of 6,800 chips per wafer this give us 40,800 chips for a total hash rate of  77.52 TH/s.  Next we are going to receive 19 wafers by the end of April for a total of 245.48 TH/s, giving us 323 TH/s.  In May we will be able to get all of the wafers we want to run.

That's interesting.  If true, he is starting a full wafer lot and then holding 19 wafers before first metal.  This is a common strategy to validate your design with the first few wafers so if there are problems you can go to mask edit and only scrap the 6 wafers.

My editorial comment would be that his estimate of hash per wafer seems about 30-40% high for 55 nm, and UMC has a reputation for horrible yields.  On top of that expecting packaged and tested chips in 1 week is very optimistic.  Most teams have been running more like 60 days to get from finished silicon to tested boards.

[mainline]

Everyone seems to be getting lost in the details - finding errors in Ken's math, laughing at his delusional projections, etc., etc.
When there is absolutely no evidence of *anything at all being done.*

A quick, loosely chronological rundown of claims and supporting evidence:

-Ken claims that 28nm chips would be hashing now.
  They're not.  No sample chips, nothing.

-Ken claims that the engineers hired to design boards for the nonexistent chips botched the project and are fired.
  No evidence of botched boards.  Not even the name of the company which was supposedly hired on to do the work & later fired.

-Ken promises to migrate shares to TC.
  Lol, no.

-A guy going by Bargraphics, with a history of shilling for scam companies, quells the doubters by promising to visit Ken in person.  Promises to bring back shitloads of pics and real answers.
  Comes back with "good feels" and no pics.

-Ken claims to buy a "stealth startup" with 55nm maskset and 2 engineers in tow.
  No evidence at all of that taking place.

The only evidence of "Virtual Identity [sic] known as Active Mining" having any projections into our mundane corporal reality is...

A picture of an old guy in a warehouse...  Three workbenches...  A few dozen empty rack cases.

lol

[MrTeal]

Ken very rarely gives figures and information so i don't take the below quote lightly...

Maybe you are reading into his wording too much Entropy

Update on trading and wafers:

It is going to be a few more days before, I can get the verifying program uploaded to the server.

I have been busy getting on the February UMC production run for our 55nm chip.

We are going to get 6 Wafer in the middle of April with about 1 week to package the chips.  Based on our estimated yield of 6,800 chips per wafer this give us 40,800 chips for a total hash rate of  77.52 TH/s.  Next we are going to receive 19 wafers by the end of April for a total of 245.48 TH/s, giving us 323 TH/s.  In May we will be able to get all of the wafers we want to run.

That's interesting.  If true, he is starting a full wafer lot and then holding 19 wafers before first metal.  This is a common strategy to validate your design with the first few wafers so if there are problems you can go to mask edit and only scrap the 6 wafers.

My editorial comment would be that his estimate of hash per wafer seems about 30-40% high for 55 nm, and UMC has a reputation for horrible yields.  On top of that expecting packaged and tested chips in 1 week is very optimistic.  Most teams have been running more like 60 days to get from finished silicon to tested boards.

I can't believe I never noticed this thread before.

His estimate might be a little high, but it doesn't seem impossible given the competition. Bitfury chips can do 3GH/s with better efficiency than these specs (though no one seems to run them that high), so ~12.7TH/s per wafer before losses. Antminer is claiming a 12mm^2 die and they're getting 2.8GH/s in their miners at pretty much exactly the same efficiency as Ken is claiming, so that would be ~14TH/s per wafer raw. That's right in line with that these numbers.
I'd be interested in what you would estimate the cost of 5 lots of wafers for a 55nm process, along with the mask set cost. Fabs are notoriously tight-lipped with these estimates, and I don't have access to any recent GSA reports.

I'd be more worried about his timelines and costs, especially since the profit projections he's releasing have them mining on May 1 with 1.2PH/s when the bulk of the wafers aren't scheduled to arrive until May sometime. They also don't seem to amortize the cost of the mask set or infrastructure in the hardware costs in those projections. I'm still not sure if that was meant as some kind of cruel joke though.

[wasubii]

Ken very rarely gives figures and information so i don't take the below quote lightly...

Maybe you are reading into his wording too much Entropy

Update on trading and wafers:

It is going to be a few more days before, I can get the verifying program uploaded to the server.

I have been busy getting on the February UMC production run for our 55nm chip.

We are going to get 6 Wafer in the middle of April with about 1 week to package the chips.  Based on our estimated yield of 6,800 chips per wafer this give us 40,800 chips for a total hash rate of  77.52 TH/s.  Next we are going to receive 19 wafers by the end of April for a total of 245.48 TH/s, giving us 323 TH/s.  In May we will be able to get all of the wafers we want to run.

That's interesting.  If true, he is starting a full wafer lot and then holding 19 wafers before first metal.  This is a common strategy to validate your design with the first few wafers so if there are problems you can go to mask edit and only scrap the 6 wafers.

My editorial comment would be that his estimate of hash per wafer seems about 30-40% high for 55 nm, and UMC has a reputation for horrible yields.  On top of that expecting packaged and tested chips in 1 week is very optimistic.  Most teams have been running more like 60 days to get from finished silicon to tested boards.

I can't believe I never noticed this thread before.

His estimate might be a little high, but it doesn't seem impossible given the competition. Bitfury chips can do 3GH/s with better efficiency than these specs (though no one seems to run them that high), so ~12.7TH/s per wafer before losses. Antminer is claiming a 12mm^2 die and they're getting 2.8GH/s in their miners at pretty much exactly the same efficiency as Ken is claiming, so that would be ~14TH/s per wafer raw. That's right in line with that these numbers.
I'd be interested in what you would estimate the cost of 5 lots of wafers for a 55nm process, along with the mask set cost. Fabs are notoriously tight-lipped with these estimates, and I don't have access to any recent GSA reports.

I'd be more worried about his timelines and costs, especially since the profit projections he's releasing have them mining on May 1 with 1.2PH/s when the bulk of the wafers aren't scheduled to arrive until May sometime. They also don't seem to amortize the cost of the mask set or infrastructure in the hardware costs in those projections. I'm still not sure if that was meant as some kind of cruel joke though.

I believe what Entropy is referring to is the normal yield from wafers. When chips are produced on wafers there is a known and acceptable loss due to defects in the surface of the silicon.

What Ken has done in his calculation is said, one wafer can make X chips, each chip produces Y hash, so the hash rate from each wafer is X*Y

So in his calculation he hasn't allowed for any scrapped chips (which is totally normal during chip/wafer production)

[MrTeal]

I believe what Entropy is referring to is the normal yield from wafers. When chips are produced on wafers there is a known and acceptable loss due to defects in the surface of the silicon.

What Ken has done in his calculation is said, one wafer can make X chips, each chip produces Y hash, so the hash rate from each wafer is X*Y

So in his calculation he hasn't allowed for any scrapped chips (which is totally normal during chip/wafer production)

That's possible, though if Bitmain was getting 14TH/s raw from their wafers 12.7TH/s is about a 90% yield.

[wasubii]

I believe what Entropy is referring to is the normal yield from wafers. When chips are produced on wafers there is a known and acceptable loss due to defects in the surface of the silicon.

What Ken has done in his calculation is said, one wafer can make X chips, each chip produces Y hash, so the hash rate from each wafer is X*Y

So in his calculation he hasn't allowed for any scrapped chips (which is totally normal during chip/wafer production)

That's possible, though if Bitmain was getting 14TH/s raw from their wafers 12.7TH/s is about a 90% yield.

You're comparing apples and pears - the bitmain chip and the ActM chip are designed independently, just because they are both 55nm doesn't mean they share the same RTL code...

[MrTeal]

I believe what Entropy is referring to is the normal yield from wafers. When chips are produced on wafers there is a known and acceptable loss due to defects in the surface of the silicon.

What Ken has done in his calculation is said, one wafer can make X chips, each chip produces Y hash, so the hash rate from each wafer is X*Y

So in his calculation he hasn't allowed for any scrapped chips (which is totally normal during chip/wafer production)

That's possible, though if Bitmain was getting 14TH/s raw from their wafers 12.7TH/s is about a 90% yield.

You're comparing apples and pears - the bitmain chip and the ActM chip are designed independently, just because they are both 55nm doesn't mean they share the same RTL code...

I'm not saying they do. I'm just tossing that out there as an example of a chip that probably does yield in the same ballpark as ActM is claiming to say it's not an impossibility. The actual ActM chip could do better, the same, worse or plain not work at all. Ken just said that the design was supposed to yield ~6800 chips and since Ken never shares where he gets his numbers from we don't know if that's raw*estimated yield or just raw.

[Entropy-uc]

I can't believe I never noticed this thread before.

His estimate might be a little high, but it doesn't seem impossible given the competition. Bitfury chips can do 3GH/s with better efficiency than these specs (though no one seems to run them that high), so ~12.7TH/s per wafer before losses. Antminer is claiming a 12mm^2 die and they're getting 2.8GH/s in their miners at pretty much exactly the same efficiency as Ken is claiming, so that would be ~14TH/s per wafer raw. That's right in line with that these numbers.
I'd be interested in what you would estimate the cost of 5 lots of wafers for a 55nm process, along with the mask set cost. Fabs are notoriously tight-lipped with these estimates, and I don't have access to any recent GSA reports.

I'd be more worried about his timelines and costs, especially since the profit projections he's releasing have them mining on May 1 with 1.2PH/s when the bulk of the wafers aren't scheduled to arrive until May sometime. They also don't seem to amortize the cost of the mask set or infrastructure in the hardware costs in those projections. I'm still not sure if that was meant as some kind of cruel joke though.

Ken claimed 0.7V to get his power numbers.  Those ultra low voltage processes have dismal yields.  It doesn't matter to Bitfury because he is getting a huge premium for his devices.

Schedule is definitely the cruel joke of this latest round.  If Ken gets first silicon in April, he will be lucky to have validated boards in June.  Then it is another 60 days for volume wafers.  By then there will be 20nm products on the market, and possibly 14 nm.

Costs are tough to say with any precision.  Everything is negotiable and the semi market is really horrible right now.  If it was a good market he wouldn't get wafer starts at all.  Foundries research their customers, and he wouldn't come through that looking very good.  Ball park:

Mask Set $400k
Payment to People's ASIC 
Wafer starts $3k
Bumping, Packaging, assembly, test NRE  $100k

Back end unit costs will be significantly more than silicon.

I would expect that he needs to build 1 Ph/s just to get his real costs lower than just buying Antminers in bulk.

[klondike_bar]

this got moderated from the official thread - lol



the license plate is  'ACTM 911' - seemed fitting

[Entropy-uc]

this got moderated from the official thread - lol

the license plate is  'ACTM 911' - seemed fitting

It's really strange what does and does not get moderated over there.  Ken really goes into a rage when I call him an alcoholic.  :-)

The Stockholm Syndrome really has a grip on the throats of most folks over there.  They take the most ridiculous claims at face value if it offers the tiniest glimmer of a chance to exit with their skin intact.  Nobody asks where the 10s of millions to make a 28 nm device will come from even while Ken is desperately trying to come up with $80k selling shares while he holds everyone else's shares hostage.

And of course there is the greatest elephant in the room.  Customers.  According to Ken he sold $6M of easic devices that were promised to customers in November.  A project that he has now cancelled.  And yet there is no one complaining.  Not a peep.  Cointerra is a month late, but actually shipping and folks are warming up the tar and feathers for Ravi and his team.  But Ken's customers, dead silence.  Maybe all his customers are from areas without internet access?? 

[Entropy-uc]

Funny, I just noticed this bit about account setup at UMC.  I really doubt that UMC would build masks for a customer without an account, so that means no 55 nm tapeout yet.  Based on Ken's promptness on getting shares tradeable, I guess he'll tape out in May.  If they have the money...

Weekly Update 2/5/2013

This last week has been very busy with our Project manager and engineers working with eASIC on our 28nm custom chip.  We have receive the first results back and the chip is expected to run at 30 GH/s, we are working on improving this number.  Also, we have received the quote on our PCIe board and our project manager and engineers are meeting with eASIC and our board engineers this week to keep our project on track.  We are also meeting with UMC to finalize our account setup.  We are also thinking about going to a 20nm custom chip and skipping the 28nm, if we can get it produced fast enough.

[DeadwoodDan]

Welp, this got memoryholed, so I guess Ken still has a plan behind the madness.  I do wonder about that preorder claim... millions of goddamn dollars, and only one guy ever showed up on bitcointalk to complain?

A reply of yours, quoted below, was deleted by the starter of a self-moderated topic. There are no rules of self-moderation, so this deletion cannot be appealed. Do not continue posting in this topic if the topic-starter has requested that you leave.

You can create a new topic if you are unsatisfied with this one. If the topic-starter is scamming, post about it in Scam Accusations.

Can I ask again about those millions of dollars we have in preorders?  Are we still holding the money?  Are the customers all cool with it?

Also, are our own miners included in the figure for preorders?  I'm a bit uncertain on how a virtual entity representing both itself and its profits works when the company owning the virtual entity is based in Belize and the virtual entity is doing business in the United States of America.  Would the virtual entity preorder miners from its and its profits' owner?