ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

[dexX7]

If you don't know this thread, bookmark it:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=220837

Franktank is doing a great job centralizing official information and summarizing the news every quarters.

I'd advise any new investor in AM to read up every posts from friedcat since at least September, it's the only way to distinguish real info from reasonable speculation/crazy speculation/totally wrong stuff.

Yes, thanks, I know that thread. Great job by Franktank. And still I'm looking for the missing piece between:

Hardware Update
• Already shipped devices(Gen1, already shipped) were limited by quantity of the power chip supply we pre-ordered before two months.
• We made an order of another brand of power chips which are about two weeks late. In October this will provide another 500TH/s (Gen1).
• If any deal of ordering Gen1 chips from outside buyers via us is reached, additional orders will be made.
• The size of the Gen2 order will be decided as appropriate, according to the network difficulty when it is time to finalize the order size.

8. Financial Report
The next official ASICMINER Financial Report is scheduled to be released on October 20s. We had been in the process of accumulating reserves for a two-year-based small lab (all salaries) and a full mask cost for 40nm for one month. Additional income may be reserved for other chip advancements.

Next Gen Chips
The projected time of taping out of Gen3 is January 20. Power consumption target estimation is <0.2W per G on low power mode and <0.2$ per G on wafer cost. Please notice that the timeline is of course subject to change/adjust, and the estimation on power and cost is also based on software tool/simulation results.

Gen 2 was mentioned on Sep 24, it's unclear which generation the 40 nm belongs to and on Nov 22 gen 3 was announced. I don't see anything that explicitly says that there is no gen 2.

[sochee]

I think the future of ASICMINER now is really not in their own hands anymore, but depends on the competitors. We now have a vague timeline for Gen 3 chips (how "Gen 3" they are is up for debate); they will probably ship in March or April (providing Friedcat keeps to his promises). This is a huge amount of time in the Bitcoin world... if any competitors were to release a comparable product that actually shipped and was reliable, 1 to 2 months before ASICMINER gets finished, Friedcat is done for. I really have no idea why he sat on his ass after 'winning' Gen 1, but there you go. I'm not even sure who buys miners anymore when the difficulty is jumping so fast, if we could just go back to owning 10-15% of the network and getting good dividends every week, I would be more than happy. Focus on making good hardware and mining instead of packaging all this stuff, shipping it out, customer support, etc.

[empoweoqwj]

I think the future of ASICMINER now is really not in their own hands anymore, but depends on the competitors. We now have a vague timeline for Gen 3 chips (how "Gen 3" they are is up for debate); they will probably ship in March or April (providing Friedcat keeps to his promises). This is a huge amount of time in the Bitcoin world... if any competitors were to release a comparable product that actually shipped and was reliable, 1 to 2 months before ASICMINER gets finished, Friedcat is done for. I really have no idea why he sat on his ass after 'winning' Gen 1, but there you go. I'm not even sure who buys miners anymore when the difficulty is jumping so fast, if we could just go back to owning 10-15% of the network and getting good dividends every week, I would be more than happy. Focus on making good hardware and mining instead of packaging all this stuff, shipping it out, customer support, etc.

Looking for a single line in there I could agree with, but I can't.

Clearly fc didn't "sit on his ass" after "winning" Gen 1. I bet he has worked his ass off consistently for the last 12 months without break. Good question to ask him for next Q&A session? How many days off have you taken in last year?

[JimiQ84]

friedcat expanded out of mining - immersion cooling, USB hubs, backplanes...

[sochee]

@ empoweoqwj, okay, I will admit we can't know what he has been doing. However, how could he have been so successful on Gen 1 and then completely failed this generation? If he has been working his ass off for 12 months, why are we still at 60TH/s after all this time? Why did he go from the most reliable and leading-edge supplier to someone with no relevance whatsoever in the current market? I have read all 798 pages of this thread so I know how fanatically people believe in him being all-knowing and do-no-wrong. But even you must admit he has little to show for in the last few months. Whatever happened, we can't even know, since he is so poor at communicating. Unless you buy 5000 shares, you will get vague updates and numbers once a month, if you are lucky. A far cry from detailed updates every week when we started this venture.

PS expanded out of mining - really? You think immersion cooling is his own product that he's going to sell to people? You think USB hubs and backplanes are good products that will make money?

[sochee]

@ pankkake - yes I did read all the pages, ASICMINER started as a mining company and there are 100s of pages with people being obsessed with the hashrate. Only when it fell into irrelevancy did you start conveniently calling it "meaningless", but it is in fact not meaningless. Expanding to hardware is ok - when it makes sense. Gen 1 made sense because a large number of factors came together at the same time.

BFL and all the other competitors failed - there was no one to compete with. It was still the "gold rush" period for bitcoin - difficulty was still believably low and individuals were buying miners. Old technology was still relevant - let's not forget that Friedcat was basically selling a few chips using 10-year old technology for the price of a decent used car.

Now everything has changed, but for some reason no one realizes this. There are a ton of viable competitors who have actually overtaken ASICMINER and shipped better, faster hardware. ASICMINER is now the one playing catch-up. It is not the gold rush anymore; it is easier for individuals and individual newcomers to see that mining is hardly profitable, hardware becomes obsolete within a month and barely buys back it's buying price if lucky, and all of this will be doubly true come March, when the difficulty will be immense. Friedcat can no longer sell old chips - he must use more modern silicon, which means more manufacturing difficulties, higher costs, and lower margins.

I know all of you want it to go back to 5, I do too, since I put a lot of money into the company. But it's time to stop being delusional and use logic - ASICMINER is not the king anymore, and will likely never be.

[jimmothy]

Now everything has changed, but for some reason no one realizes this. There are a ton of viable competitors who have actually overtaken ASICMINER and shipped better, faster hardware. ASICMINER is now the one playing catch-up. It is not the gold rush anymore; it is easier for individuals and individual newcomers to see that mining is hardly profitable, hardware becomes obsolete within a month and barely buys back it's buying price if lucky, and all of this will be doubly true come March, when the difficulty will be immense. Friedcat can no longer sell old chips - he must use more modern silicon, which means more manufacturing difficulties, higher costs, and lower margins.

I know all of you want it to go back to 5, I do too, since I put a lot of money into the company. But it's time to stop being delusional and use logic - ASICMINER is not the king anymore, and will likely never be.

Care to name one of the competition that is "overtaking" asicminer. Am cube which uses old "used car" tech still competes in cost efficiency wotb those brand new 28nm new tech chips from knc and bitfury.

If you bought at 5btc/per that is your own fault for buying in to an incredibly overvalued stock at the time. It was obvious that 5btc per share is ridiculous because 10% network hashrate equates to 1btc/share and maybe this says something about how dilusional you are regarding asicminers value.

And when it comes to future gen chips it looks like the competition will be doing the catching up.

[velacreations]

There are a ton of viable competitors who have actually overtaken ASICMINER and shipped better, faster hardware.

can you provide a list of this "ton of viable competitors" that are currently shipping at lower costs than AM?

[caoxg]

Hi, I just visited ASICMINER's immersion cooling farm facility nowadays.

Please check another topic for details: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346134.0

Please consider donate: http://dreamchina.com/projects/59666

[apollojmr]

There are a ton of viable competitors who have actually overtaken ASICMINER and shipped better, faster hardware.

can you provide a list of this "ton of viable competitors" that are currently shipping at lower costs than AM?

+1

[bitfair]

There's a lot of complaining in this thread lately, which is understandable, considering large swings in stock prices can cause strong emotions.

I just wanted to put this whole thing in a bit more perspective: about 16 months ago, Bitfountain collected about $100k from investors to complete some chips. Today, they have a large warchest of savings, a steady income stream, and they are working in parallel on the 3rd generation of chips, liquid cooling +++, and the company is "valued" at approximately $100 million (not to mention that investors have already collectively received payouts of about XBT 240k, almost $200 million at today's prices). In light of this, my personal opinion is that we should at least keep the discourse respectful.

From my point of view, the company has plenty of promise and is busy fulfilling the promise. Competition has grown stronger, but anybody surprised by that is a pinhead - it was obvious from the start there would be an ASIC price-war/arms race. But there will be several winners, and AM is well-positioned to be one of them: well-funded, well-located, experienced and (dare I say?) visionary.

I'm not trying to talk the price up or anything (I don't care much about the flavor of the month), I just wanted to point out that, in my humble opinion, AM has delivered magnificently so far, and has staying power for the long term.

[apollojmr]

There's a lot of complaining in this thread lately, which is understandable, considering large swings in stock prices can cause strong emotions.

I just wanted to put this whole thing in a bit more perspective: about 16 months ago, Bitfountain collected about $100k from investors to complete some chips. Today, they have a large warchest of savings, a steady income stream, and they are working in parallel on the 3rd generation of chips, liquid cooling +++, and the company is "valued" at approximately $100 million (not to mention that investors have already collectively received payouts of about XBT 240k, almost $200 million at today's prices). In light of this, my personal opinion is that we should at least keep the discourse respectful.

From my point of view, the company has plenty of promise and is busy fulfilling the promise. Competition has grown stronger, but anybody surprised by that is a pinhead - it was obvious from the start there would be an ASIC price-war/arms race. But there will be several winners, and AM is well-positioned to be one of them: well-funded, well-located, experienced and (dare I say?) visionary.

I'm not trying to talk the price up or anything (I don't care much about the flavor of the month), I just wanted to point out that, in my humble opinion, AM has delivered magnificently so far, and has staying power for the long term.

This is an extremely great write up and posts the truth about what they have done as an amazing company in a very short period of time. Thank you for putting this into perspective for anyone who may be new or maybe just lost the reality in their mind of this amazing feat.

[bitfair]

This is an extremely great write up and posts the truth about what they have done as an amazing company in a very short period of time. Thank you for putting this into perspective for anyone who may be new or maybe just lost the reality in their mind of this amazing feat.

Thanks. It's easy to forget everything that has happened in the last year when people are so busy licking their wounds and thinking "I should have sold at 5!".

One more thing: people keep repeating here that gen 1 tech is useless. However: the marginal cost of producing (i.e. electricity@$0.06/kWh) of producing 1 XBT with gen1 tech (7 J/GH) is currently $12.20. At current bitcoin price, it is profitable to keep these babies running until network hash rate is above 350 PH. So for those claiming that gen 1 is outdated, please show me how you reach that conclusion.

Anyway, for those missing it, here's my pump: liquid cooling + 0.2 J/GH = $$$!

[sochee]

It simply isn't the unique source of income, and was overtaken by selling hardware more than once.
It's not convenience, it's not being dumb.

Yes, I'm aware it's not the unique source of income. I already said that diversifying makes sense, when it works. Right now we have no good hardware and no "meaningful" mining, so "not being dumb" isn't working out that well.

Care to name one of the competition that is "overtaking" asicminer. Am cube which uses old "used car" tech still competes in cost efficiency wotb those brand new 28nm new tech chips from knc and bitfury.

can you provide a list of this "ton of viable competitors" that are currently shipping at lower costs than AM?

I will leave it to you to exit the ASICMINER echo chamber and do some research of their competitors. I'll give you a hint - the network hasn't reached 5300 TH because of blades and cubes.

If you bought at 5btc/per that is your own fault for buying in to an incredibly overvalued stock at the time. It was obvious that 5btc per share is ridiculous because 10% network hashrate equates to 1btc/share and maybe this says something about how dilusional you are regarding asicminers value.

I never said I bought in at 5BTC, and I'm not "dilusional" about it's value, in fact, I'm quite realistic. There's no need to resort to personal attacks if you feel I have a strong argument.

There's a lot of complaining in this thread lately, which is understandable, considering large swings in stock prices can cause strong emotions.

It's not "complaining" - it's being realistic. I have no idea why you uphold Friedcat as some deity that cannot be doubted and that we should all worship and never slander. And anyway, shareholders have all the right in the world to "complain" about a company they are invested in - I was part of the original IPO and I can say whatever I want because it was partly my money that allowed Friedcat to do what he did. Most of this thread, especially in the last few weeks, is for emotional support, where you guys keep convincing each other "yeah it'll go back up! Friedcat knows everything and this was his plan! to da moon!". Friedcat is what Americans call a "one hit wonder", if that is the correct terminology.

[velacreations]

I will leave it to you to exit the ASICMINER echo chamber and do some research of their competitors. I'll give you a hint - the network hasn't reached 5300 TH because of blades and cubes.

this is what you said:

There are a ton of viable competitors who have actually overtaken ASICMINER and shipped better, faster hardware.

I'm asking you to back that statement up with some evidence.  So, I'll ask again, can you provide a list of the "ton of viable companies" currently shipping hardware at or below AM prices? (hint, a "ton" of ASIC companies currently shipping hardware doesn't exist)

[velacreations]

Yes, I'm aware it's not the unique source of income. I already said that diversifying makes sense, when it works. Right now we have no good hardware and no "meaningful" mining, so "not being dumb" isn't working out that well.

It already worked out well.  They already made the money, and more than they could have made mining with it.  

Are you trying to say that if they didn't sell hardware they would have made more money by this point of time by mining with that hardware?  Because that statement would be completely false.  If you are trying to imply that it's true, you need to provide some math.

[ex-trader]

Forget about prices or values of competitor products, here's a simple fact:

The network has gone from 1+ PH to 5+ PH in under 60 DAYS!!!!!!

Now unless anyone thinks that's people buying 4PH of GPU cards then it's clear there is a huge amount of ASICS being shipped or being privately mined. I suspect there are several very big miners who have been backed by serious money who have built and operate their own chips and tell no-one.

That's the threat, why buy AM at $100m, when you can duplicate them for $5m.

[Zubilica]

Donno about submerged mining but i have seen less mining from AM in these days , i hope dividends will surpass 0.001

[neutralist]

 I suspect there are several very big miners who have been backed by serious money who have built and operate their own chips and tell no-one.

These entities have a name for it. It is called 國營企業.

[tinus42]

 I suspect there are several very big miners who have been backed by serious money who have built and operate their own chips and tell no-one.

These entities have a name for it. It is called 國營企業.

State-owned enterprises?