ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

[friedcat]

Introduction
ASICMINER is a virtual identity totally held by investors of the Bitfountain company. The Bitfountain company's business includes mining with self-built ASIC devices, as well as the sales of them. Currently ASICMINER shareholders holds 163,962 shares, while Bitfountain shareholders holds 236,038 shares. ASICMINER shares have the privilege of getting all net profits till 0.1BTC/share from the day when dividends began to be paid. They also have the exemption of dilution, which means that each ASICMINER share always equals to 1/400,000 of the total profits and voting power of the summed value from both ASICMINER and Bitfountain.

How to buy shares
There are no public exchanges approved or chosen by us yet. Nor we will be selling any of them without a public announcement. Currently you could only buy shares from earlier investors privately with or without third-party escrows. We provide no escrow service. The trade should be registered in our database to make the dividend payment conform with the transfer.

Dividend payment
The income, including mining income, sales via Bitcoins, and fiat income transferred to Bitcoins, are paid to ASICMINER and Bitfountain shareholders proportionally after the ASICMINER shares are paid by 0.1BTC each from the day when dividends began to be paid, when maintainance costs, labor costs, and R&D costs are taken.

Our chips
Generation 1: Block Eruptor. 130nm with 6-8J/GH. Each chip's rated frequency is 336MHz at 1.05V. It translates to 336MH/s because it does one hash per cycle. The chips work stable and well at 392MH/s at 1.15V. Further overclocking needs proper handling of heat and power supply.

[friedcat]

Q: Why could I trust you?
A: In principle, like scientific theories, trustworthiness can only be
disproved. However some facts might contribute to more confidence: My ID, phone and email have all
been verified in GLBSE. I started running the fund called MU on GLBSE before it updated to version
2. I am also responsible for the GLBSE-listed bond MOORE.

Q: What about your partners?
A: They are my friends also located in China. I know them in person, trust
them myself in person. They are enthusiastic to this project and already commited a lot of hard
work at their best to make it succeed.

Q: Are you qualified of running Bitfountain and ASICMINER?
A: The short answer is yes.
    The long answer is: Although I myself come from a software background, my other two partners
have been worked in the IC field for long. One of my partners worked in a national lab focusing on
microprocessor design, the other worked in an CPU-for-embedded-device startup. Mining ASICs are
easy to be made work compared to their former projects, and the only problem is how good we could
make it to be. In this aspect, we have done almost all baseline optimizations and some more
aggressive ones. The uncommonly high heat density of mining ASICs is another technical problem but
we are also confident in solving it nicely.

Q: Why don't you raise money from angels or venture capitals?
A: Because most of them come from a different background to Bitcoin. The risk
model of their minds is far away from that of the Bitcoin community. They would consider Bitcoin
itself as an extra major, if not the biggest, source of risk. Therefore they usually tend to pose
harsher clauses than the Bitcoin community on us.

Q: Why don't you borrow money to do it?
A: Same as most startups: the expense is beyond the number we could borrow
from a normal channel. Plus, we are frank that our project involves quite a few risks. We choose to
share both the risks and the profits to investors willing to take them.

Q: Why do you choose to do IPO so early when you haven't reached the stage
of sending your final designs to the foundry?
A: Because we have to save time. If the IPO takes too long, or doesn't work
out so that we have find inferior ways to raise funds, time elapses and we will be outpaced by our
competitors. A IPO in parallel with the later stage of physical design will make the arriving date
of our products earlier. Plus, if we finally have found that it is necessary to cancel the IPO,
100.5% of all raised funds will be turned back to investors.

Q: What if your first generation of chips are outdated? What if the other
companies deliver their products earlier than you do?
A: The so called "outdated" technology is exactly why we have so inexpensive
NRE. And we plan to do self-mining before product-selling, to avoid pre-maturely triggering a
fierce price war. There will almost definitely a relatively long window for both us and our
competitors to profit before the market price of hashrates falls down to their margin cost. In
this time range, the difficulty will not exceed a level that even with our technology of choice,
the electricity fee and management cost is still negligible compared to the Bitcoins mined.

Q: The privileges of board members are vague. What exactly could they do?
A: Some of the information and details of our company is only provided on
request of board members. Board members can monitor our business running face to face, or send
representations to do it. We also hope that board members could help us with a full-fledged
open financial management on both the RMB-nominated and BTC-nominated funds.

Q: How will your MU and MOORE interact with ASICMINER?
A: I will try to keep as objective as possible and evaluate ASICMINER as yet
another normal startup when considering the configuration of the MU portfolio. MOORE, on the other
hand, will be boosted up to in MH/s per share with ASICMINER in exchange of its raised funds when
our chips come out, and also will be used as one of the mechanisms for ASICMINER to sell hashrates
in the future.

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Q: What is your fundraising target? How do you decide whether this IPO succeeds or not?
A: The minimum target is 100k$. If the raised funds surpass this number, we will consider that our IPO is successful. However, we would like to raise more (120-140k$) because keeping the budget at minimum is very prone to unexpected scenarios.

Q: So you will send the extra shares at at time?
A: Yes.

Q: How do you achieve so low costs?
A: There are several factors.
  1. 130nm node size. As the mainstream switches to 28nm, the 130nm existed for so long that even many smaller foundries could do it very well. The intense competition of manufacturing in China brings the price of everything down, including ICs.
  2. MLM(Multi-Level-Mask). Compared to full-mask, this technology reduces the cost of mask-set to half with the exchange of increasing the margin cost by about 40%. This is a good deal for us because the margin cost of chips themselves is one of the lowest cost in our budget.
  3. Low EDA license fees and low labor cost in China.
  4. We ourselves did most of the RTL design, optimization and simulation.

Q: Why don't you use Bitfountain for your GLBSE ticker?
A: Because the ASICMINER shareholders (GLBSE investors) have an extra set of privileges upon Bitfountain shareholder (us).

[friedcat]

When will I be able to buy in on the GLBSE?

Thanks for you interest. The 30,000 shares for public sale is already put as an ask wall on the GLBSE system with the asset name ASICMINER.

In fact the ASICMINER ticker was created more than a week ago. We were double-checking and discussing about the IPO details so the IPO was delayed to today.

[friedcat]

This looks interesting and is a nice breath of air against all those ponzi listings

Thanks. Though I won't call many suspected ones ponzis myself, but we feel that given all
the risks involved, the venture on ASICMINER still does not belong to the riskiest class of
GLBSE assets.

As a miner I look forward to the product, BFL needs a serious competitor

The products for sale will not be very early. However, if approved by all my partners and
motion-passed by our shareholders, we will be giving out a small batch of our first-generation
products to the community for free.

*buys the first 5 shares for .5 btc* equivalent price to a beer in my local bar. Cheers.

Thank you. Maybe it's just me kidding, but I still can't help my self saying it's not totally impossible
that the whole return could buy you a bar after several years.

[memvola]

I'm sure this is addressed before, but how certain are you about the dates? They seem too optimistic to me. Can you give us a best / worst case range?

I will try to keep as objective as possible and evaluate ASICMINER as yet another normal startup when considering the configuration of the MU portfolio.

It would be particularly nice if this were to boost up MU also. Since you are an insider, MU has an opportunity to jump in earlier if things turn out fine.

[Sukrim]

About all that "as soon as we have raised enough, we won't sell any more shares" thingie:

Imagine, BTC prices still rise as crazy and you only need to sell 100k shares - does the other party (Bitfountain) then own 200k shares (2/3rds of the company) or is it then just that each ASICMINER share owns 1/200000 instead of 1/400000 of the company?

Will additional (unsold) shares be sold later or deleted, including a change in contract that you will not sell more than the ones sold - ever?

Also I find it worrying that you give that high discounts for bigger investors - 10%, 12.5% etc. are far from what I'd call reasonable. After all, why should I as a smaller investor then buy a handful of shares, if others get them for a LOT cheaper? This actually discourages me to buy directly from you, but rather hoping that someone wants to make some quick money by buying at 12.5% discount and immediately opening a (cheaper than 0.1 BTC) bidwall.

[friedcat]

Thanks for your question. I will try to answer them.

About all that "as soon as we have raised enough, we won't sell any more shares" thingie:

Imagine, BTC prices still rise as crazy and you only need to sell 100k shares - does the other party (Bitfountain) then own 200k shares (2/3rds of the company) or is it then just that each ASICMINER share owns 1/200000 instead of 1/400000 of the company?

If BTC prices still rises as crazy after we stopped selling, we will do a proportional return as a big dividend before we begin to exchange BTC for fiat. But each ASICMINER share always owns 1/400000 of the company.

Will additional (unsold) shares be sold later or deleted, including a change in contract that you will not sell more than the ones sold - ever?

The unsold shares may be sold later, but hopefully with a higher price if we successfully produced our first batch of chips. We only guarantee that no more than 200,000 shares will be created and sold ever.

Also I find it worrying that you give that high discounts for bigger investors - 10%, 12.5% etc. are far from what I'd call reasonable. After all, why should I as a smaller investor then buy a handful of shares, if others get them for a LOT cheaper? This actually discourages me to buy directly from you, but rather hoping that someone wants to make some quick money by buying at 12.5% discount and immediately opening a (cheaper than 0.1 BTC) bidwall.

The price spread caused by the discounts are indeed large. From the investors perspective, who are not willing to buy so many shares for the discounts, could either directly buy from us, or from other people who offer less price. From our perspective, while it indeed discourages investors to directly buy small amounts from us, it attracts larger bulk purchase. After all, finally the market will settle the price down.

The important thing is that we will only give the extra shares when we decide that the IPO does not fail. Because when it fails and we return back the 100.5% capital, we don't want to cause any wealth re-distribution from small investors to larger ones, since in the GLBSE system all shares are identical.

[friedcat]

I'm sure this is addressed before, but how certain are you about the dates? They seem too optimistic to me. Can you give us a best / worst case range?

The typical production time of the mask-set by the foundry is 45-60 days. So in the best case, it is indeed possible that we finish the back-end in August, get chips produced in October, and make the first one working within the same month. The worse case is very hard to say, because there might even be failure cases. But November is already a little conservative, and we will definitely make the chips start hashing within this year, if we succeed.

I will try to keep as objective as possible and evaluate ASICMINER as yet another normal startup when considering the configuration of the MU portfolio.

It would be particularly nice if this were to boost up MU also. Since you are an insider, MU has an opportunity to jump in earlier if things turn out fine.
[/quote]

Yes. The expected date of making MU jump in is when we have found that the IPO itself is about to be successful.

[friedcat]

About the Extra Shares

The extra shares will be sent to investors when we decide that the IPO is about to succeed. Because if not and when we have to return back the 100.5% capital, we don't want to cause any wealth re-distribution from small investors to larger ones, since in the GLBSE system all shares are identical.

This means that if someone buys, say, 800 BTC worth of shares, 8,000 shares will be immediately sent to the investor. 800 extra shares will be sent later when it is certain that our IPO succeeds and no whole-capital-refunding needs to be triggered.

We believe this decision is fair for both small and large investors, and it does not violate the main thread and the contract. Thanks.

[irritant]

could you maybe show some pictures of the hardware? , when it is ready/half ready ,

[friedcat]

could you maybe show some pictures of the hardware? , when it is ready/half ready ,

We definitely will.

We will also show other interesting pictures before the hardware is ready.

[DutchBrat]

In for a few shares, will definitely be adding more !

[Jutarul]

+1

[Jutarul]

Also it would be nice to get updates on how the private-bulk fund raising fares....

[friedcat]

Also it would be nice to get updates on how the private-bulk fund raising fares....

Got about 50,000 shares of private-bulk pre-ordering already. Not fully executed yet though.

[Lethos]

I'm new to Investing via GLBSE, but I like your project, so I'll put a few bitcoins towards it.
Think I need a cup of tea first, deposit is just pending confirmation.

[friedcat]

I'm new to Investing via GLBSE, but I like your project, so I'll put a few bitcoins towards it.
Think I need a cup of tea first, deposit is just pending confirmation.

Thanks.

BTW, to guarantee security, it is suggested to enable GLBSE's two-factor authentication provided by Google immediately after you sign up.

[Lethos]

I'm new to Investing via GLBSE, but I like your project, so I'll put a few bitcoins towards it.
Think I need a cup of tea first, deposit is just pending confirmation.

Thanks.

BTW, to guarantee security, it is suggested to enable GLBSE's two-factor authentication provided by Google immediately after you sign up.

Thank you.

[Francesco]

How much has Bitfountain already invested, to give it right to 50% of shares?

[Tachikoma]

Awesome initiative, BFL needs some competition. Bought some shares.