UpdateDear shareholders,
I am sorry for update late. I just got up from some sleep.
Most of what are going on have been asked by replies to this thread. So we start with them:
If that is Asicminer, it would be interesting to know what the plans are for the money being raised (~$5000/day?). Is there enough in the bank from the IPO to fund the full 50TH/s expansion, or will some of this be withheld in order to get all the wafer starts underway for the big push now that the design has been proven?
As we stated in earlier updates, the chips for next expansion (6-fold one, >50TH/s) are ordered and being produced in the fab already.
We are about to get the wafer in the early-to-mid next month. We did that with instalments and paid the premium by loans. The due of whole payment should be before they send us the wafers. It should not be hard to pay off the order, with reserving from our current deployment.
We will update the brief financials report and our plan of payment structures in later this thread. Any concerns about our approach are welcome.
I hate to be a d*ck, but...
I'm trying to decide if it's a bad thing that asicminer will own, at a minimum, just above 4/7 of the company when the IPO was designed as an even split.
Keep this in mind if an issue is brought to the asicminer board about suspending dividends to accumulate capital for R/D.
In a situation like that I'd say, why not just sell those extra 50k shares you decided to keep indefinitely.
This is what in our mind when doing the IPO:
1. One ASICMINER (A) share is one privileged share of our partnership (A+B) compared to Bitfountain (B) shares controlled by us founders.
2. The privileges (investor protection) are exactly the four ones listed in the main thread. Besides privileges, one ASICMINER share is no different to one Bitfountain share. This means that ASICMINER shareholders also pay for maintainance and re-investment, same as the rest of us three, while at the same time also enjoy the future benefits made possible from the maintainance and re-investment costs. This is why we stated that ASICMINER shareholders are always in a better position than any device buyers when the initial biggest risk disappeared.
3. The rest shares, when not sold, are kept and owned by Bitfountain. When they are sold, all income will be invested in our partner ship (A+B). This is what the non-dilution privilege of ASICMINER share means. They may be sold someday when the price is right and we need really big investment costs. But now the price is not fully appreciated in our point of view and the re-investment cost in the mid-term won't be so big that we have to sell them low.
4. About the portion concerns, we believe that the evaluation of (A+B) on IPO is fair to ASICMINER purchasers, because it's already much lower than most other startups seeking for angel investments. The investor protection clauses are also a pro. Of course, most angels/VCs will get more information and control, but we could still debate whether this aspect can neutralize the advantages from low evaluation and privileges.
What, no fans? These ASICS need moar fans. Everyone knows ASICS use lots of fans.
Picture taken last week.
I'd love to hear about the failure rate, the clock rate and all sorts of stuff. Congrats to all shareholders!
Failure rate <5%. Clock rate 336MHz not overclocked.
Discussions about pools/solo...
It's only a fraction of our total hashrate. Just 2TH/s on btcguild is not bringing centralization. The future of difficulty or our portion is unclear to us. If we are really lucky enough to be able to take a large percentage for a long time, we are the last ones who would like to see panics. Decentralization could be achieved by scattering some of our future computation power to consumers, or letting many different pools with different interests control them and use them for good.
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The next part is about what will happen:
Sample boards to the community: this is at the 2nd order of our priority list following deploying. Once we have enough time it will be done immediately.
The next batch: Chips are arranged by the fab to arrive next month. With the former efforts on PCB design/service seeking of the first batch, the development time of the second batch of final products should be shorter than this one. With them to expand our farm, or sell them, or do both, are still in consideration.
Trading: The platform is still in its testing cycle. Private trades are entitled when registering in our place by PM or e-mailing me. Please do it in larger quantities and lower frequency because we cannot handle too much requests in time especially in this period.
Financials and dividend plan: We are to make the final payment in early March for the next batch of wafers. We are also in some urgent and some not-so-urgent payment dues.
Urgent
* Final payment: 382,982.4 rmb + possibly some overdue fine
* Urgent private loans: 35,000 rmb
* Urgent salary payments: ~7,000 rmb
* Budget for the full deploying of the whole rest chips (upgrade of cooling/place/mechanical parts since it gets warmer when spring comes and reserves for the maintainance/rents/electricity bill generated during it): 70,000 rmb
Not-so-urgent
* Packaging, PCB manufacturing and assembly cost of the second round
* Not-so-urgent loans: 370,000 rmb + interests (which should be reduced with our part of debt to the company, because that GLBSE owes us money and we turned it to our debt to the company + GLBSE debt to us)
This is the order of payment in our plan. Please criticize and help us with a better solution if you like:
First, do the urgent payments and reserves.
Second, make payments sole to ASICMINER shareholders till they break even nominated in Bitcoins, with all what we mined, as required in the (You Break Even First) privilege clause.
Third, make regular dividend payments after ASICMINER shareholders break even. Some net profits are kept for future development, such as next batch, the way towards 65nm/45nm/better technology, and development of consumer mining devices. What in our mind is keeping 20%-40% for growth and paying 60%-80% as dividends.
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Thanks to all investors to make it happen.
We are very very proud and thankful of our engineering team, especially the PCB/whole solution engineer who worked with us in partnership. Without you the delay and uncertainty may already have kept us from moving forward.
Though our evaluation of risk is not high, luck still plays an important role to bring us to what we are in now. However, (luckily) the importance of luck would dramatically be reduced in the future, because MPW and all other time-consuming verification stages will be done in the next times.
