ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It

[papiraul]

Well someone is buying up cheap shares from all the panic sales

[minerpumpkin]

Thanks. Looks to me like jutarul pulled that number out of thin air but he does know better than any of us non-board members. Either way I think if enough people bug FC he will give us an update even if it doesn't include any real progress.

It's not pulled out of thin air, it's another deadline which FC committed to (actually it's 31-Jan), so I expect some update coming from him around that date. Otherwise the board obviously has to inquire about the delay (and do something about it).

Nice insight. I can only underline the need for such an update for the non-board investors, i.e. this forum! Be it just a heads up on the progress and the next vague steps/milestones.

Which makes me wonder, what kind of leverage does the board have? How could they influence the direction AM is going? Is there any distributed power (i.e. multiple signatures for wallets, etc...)?

[ThickAsThieves]

We are largely an advisory board, and as I've said several times in the past, you all vastly overestimate the amount of info that is exclusive to the board.

There has never been a board meeting that I can recall that resulted in any notable buying or selling of shares.

Things just aren't as sexy or dramatic as some would like to believe, sorry.

[Jutarul]

Nice insight. I can only underline the need for such an update for the non-board investors, i.e. this forum! Be it just a heads up on the progress and the next vague steps/milestones.

Major milestones have been out there for a while - I know things develop fast in bitcoin world and information which is about 2 months old feels ancient - but it's not when you look at it from a development cycle point of view...

Which makes me wonder, what kind of leverage does the board have? How could they influence the direction AM is going? Is there any distributed power (i.e. multiple signatures for wallets, etc...)?

All executive decisions are with friedcat and his team, and as such the board has only advisory capacity. The leverage is "accountability" in a general sense, and the most prominent benchmark is dividend payments. Of course there is the need for further benchmarks. No measures have been taken to distribute power across the shareholder base.

[vortex1878]

Nice insight. I can only underline the need for such an update for the non-board investors, i.e. this forum! Be it just a heads up on the progress and the next vague steps/milestones.

Major milestones have been out there for a while - I know things develop fast in bitcoin world and information which is about 2 months old feels ancient - but it's not when you look at it from a development cycle point of view...

Which makes me wonder, what kind of leverage does the board have? How could they influence the direction AM is going? Is there any distributed power (i.e. multiple signatures for wallets, etc...)?

All executive decisions are with friedcat and his team, and as such the board has only advisory capacity. The leverage is "accountability" in a general sense, and the most prominent benchmark is dividend payments. Of course there is the need for further benchmarks. No measures have been taken to distribute power across the shareholder base.

We are largely an advisory board, and as I've said several times in the past, you all vastly overestimate the amount of info that is exclusive to the board.

There has never been a board meeting that I can recall that resulted in any notable buying or selling of shares.

Things just aren't as sexy or dramatic as some would like to believe, sorry.

Do the board-members have any share of the income of BITMAIN? Is there any relation?

Not imputing anything but just would like to see some statement on this..!

I doubt that the board-members only have an advisory capacity. What's the point then? Board-members should have full voting rights for any major decisions...

[minerpumpkin]

Alright. Thanks to both of you for helping to put things in focus a bit more! 
I'll keep my eyes open for news then. And, again, please advise FC to release at least a short heads up and maybe tentative timeframes for the upcoming milestones (chip production, deployment,...)

[TiuraZ]

I doubt that the board-members only have an advisory capacity. What's the point then? Board-members should have full voting rights for any major decisions...

What's the point in voting if the board members together own less than 50% of shares? Friedcat and his team control majority of shares and votes and can do whatever they want with the company.

[Jutarul]

Do the board-members have any share of the income of BITMAIN? Is there any relation?

Not imputing anything but just would like to see some statement on this..!

I have no information pertaining BITMAIN. It will certainly be a topic in one of the next meetings.
Do you have a list of questions which need answers? If so please share them. PM works.

I doubt that the board-members only have an advisory capacity. What's the point then? Board-members should have full voting rights for any major decisions...

You overestimate the effectiveness of voting rights.
1) The majority of "voting rights" are held by the current management team of bitfountain
2) Even if you organize a large minority, what are you going to do? Force the engineers to come up with a competitive product? Undo bad business decisions (which were not obvious at the time)?

No - the only way you achieve something is by enforcing accountability, because conduct is not susceptible to majority rights. And as mentioned above, we need more benchmarks than just the dividend payments.

[minerpumpkin]

Since Jutarul just offered vortex1878 (and us?) to submit a list of questions for Friedcat to answer at the next ASICMiner board meeting, I thought we should just go ahead and compile one. I think we should limit ourselves to about 5 questions, keep them simple, no convoluted questions, no suggestive or yes/no questions.
Feel free to add suggestions. I'll forward them to Jutarul or he may be taking them directly from the post in case of a surprise board-meeting.

My suggestions:

• What is the current status of the 3rd generation chips?
• What are the estimated time frames for, respectively, producing and deploying the 3rd generation chips and hardware?
• There seems to be a certain resemblance of BITMAIN's mining hardware to ASICMiner's. Is ASICMiner affiliated with BITMAIN in any way? If yes, how?
• What are the reasons for the drastically reduced rate and amount of communication coming from ASICMiner over the last couple of months?

[chriswilmer]

Since Jutarul just offered vortex1878 (and us?) to submit a list of questions for Friedcat to answer at the next ASICMiner board meeting, I thought we should just go ahead and compile one. I think we should limit ourselves to about 5 questions, keep them simple, no convoluted questions, no suggestive or yes/no questions.
Feel free to add suggestions. I'll forward them to Jutarul or he may be taking them directly from the post in case of a surprise board-meeting.

My suggestions:

• What is the current status of the 3rd generation chips?
• What are the estimated time frames for, respectively, producing and deploying the 3rd generation chips and hardware?
• There seems to be a certain resemblance of BITMAIN's mining hardware to ASICMiner's. Is ASICMiner affiliated with BITMAIN in any way? If yes, how?
• What are the reasons for the drastically reduced rate and amount of communication coming from ASICMiner over the last couple of months?

Personally, I would ask what the longer term strategy is. What happens after gen3? What if gen3 doesn't work (that's OK with me, as long as there is a thought process about what to do next)?

-Chris

[aahzmundus]

Before the issue of AM giving out information to shareholders putting them at a disadvantage as that gave their competitors ideas about what they were up to came up. Now we also have the issue of the government in China putting in some restrictions.

I imagine if the board does get some information, they may not want to let it be public, and I could understand that.  What I would ask however is that when and if a board meeting does take place, that you let us know you did indeed meet with friedcat?

[ThunderSheep]

I would ask, in reference to Friedcat's comments of October 2, 2013,

7. Research & Development
We had tried several different really intricate and speculative designs for 2014, based on the assumption being competitive in a fully saturated market (average return rate getting close to normal business' single digits per year). but originally with a limited channel/staff, it can be very difficult to fully explore them. So, we conducted interviews, and recently identified several exceptional people.

We will be spreading design risk by working on several designs simultaneously and having all other designs' info/simulation results fed back to the main design process. Our designs changed aggressively and the expected successful rate (on a working mask) drops compared to the standard flow so it has to be fully (wave-level) simulated before fabrication.

Were there any intellectual property controls in place on the teams conducting parallel R&D?  Was it possible for one or more of those teams to carry on their work and develop competing devices, should ASICMINER choose not to use their designs?

[minerpumpkin]

I would ask, in reference to Friedcat's comments of October 2, 2013,

7. Research & Development
We had tried several different really intricate and speculative designs for 2014, based on the assumption being competitive in a fully saturated market (average return rate getting close to normal business' single digits per year). but originally with a limited channel/staff, it can be very difficult to fully explore them. So, we conducted interviews, and recently identified several exceptional people.

We will be spreading design risk by working on several designs simultaneously and having all other designs' info/simulation results fed back to the main design process. Our designs changed aggressively and the expected successful rate (on a working mask) drops compared to the standard flow so it has to be fully (wave-level) simulated before fabrication.

Were there any intellectual property controls in place on the teams conducting parallel R&D?  Was it possible for one or more of those teams to carry on their work and develop competing devices, should ASICMINER choose not to use their designs?

This could be related to the BITMAIN issue. If so, it is relevant, yes. Apart from that, how would this influence AM's future or gen 3? If FC employs people to work on the chips, I assume he makes sure to have the rights for those designs. Nice to know, but under the current circumstances maybe to complex and not that important. Let's think about this!
Good goog, keep the suggestions coming!

[shawshankinmate37927]

Quick Update

We are still on track of accumulating reinvestment funds, continuing from last month, so please expect less-than-raw-income dividends in the next few weeks. The financials will be given out in October 20s, as mentioned in the last update.

Self-retained (not sold) Hashrate distribution:

Air cooling datacenter - 47TH/s
Under franchising - 19TH/s
Immersion cooling - 5TH/s with 3-5TH/s per day towards 60TH/s in total.

Regarding the hashrate distribution update that friedcat provided on October 9th, I would ask:

 - Is the immersion cooling datacenter now operating at 60TH/s?
 - If Allied Control is not a franchisee, what is the nature of their arrangement/agreement with ASICMiner?  Is ASICMiner renting/leasing the datacenter from Allied Control?

[empoweoqwj]

No outside party trying to help with PR will get any further than I did. The communication breakdown is on AM's end.

Assuming there is any news to report...

This is the biggest worry. AM isn't even talking to TAT at the moment ....... clearly something amiss if FC refusing to talk to his biggest shareholder connection.

Why does FC keep logging in and not post anything?

[jimmothy]

No outside party trying to help with PR will get any further than I did. The communication breakdown is on AM's end.

Assuming there is any news to report...

This is the biggest worry. AM isn't even talking to TAT at the moment ....... clearly something amiss if FC refusing to talk to his biggest shareholder connection.

Why does FC keep logging in and not post anything?

Assuming TAT ever had any decent communication between him and FC. We can all agree that as investors/traders having as much info as possible would benefit us but at the same time what does it do for the company?

[empoweoqwj]

No outside party trying to help with PR will get any further than I did. The communication breakdown is on AM's end.

Assuming there is any news to report...

This is the biggest worry. AM isn't even talking to TAT at the moment ....... clearly something amiss if FC refusing to talk to his biggest shareholder connection.

Why does FC keep logging in and not post anything?

Assuming TAT ever had any decent communication between him and FC. We can all agree that as investors/traders having as much info as possible would benefit us but at the same time what does it do for the company?

Well, I'll let TAT confirm whether he ever had "any decent communication with FC", but I'm pretty sure the answer is yes ....

The worry is very simple here. AM / FC have just halted all communication this last 6 weeks. The question for me isn't "what does it do for the company", the question is "what has happened to this company?" - why is FC logging in and not speaking? If he has time to log in, he has time to put up a simple post, time to reply to TAT etc.

[Lloydie]

Weird.  Share price rising again to 0.5 Btc.

[aahzmundus]

Very, considering how much fear and confusion is going on right now...

[jimmothy]

No outside party trying to help with PR will get any further than I did. The communication breakdown is on AM's end.

Assuming there is any news to report...

This is the biggest worry. AM isn't even talking to TAT at the moment ....... clearly something amiss if FC refusing to talk to his biggest shareholder connection.

Why does FC keep logging in and not post anything?

Assuming TAT ever had any decent communication between him and FC. We can all agree that as investors/traders having as much info as possible would benefit us but at the same time what does it do for the company?

Well, I'll let TAT confirm whether he ever had "any decent communication with FC", but I'm pretty sure the answer is yes ....

The worry is very simple here. AM / FC have just halted all communication this last 6 weeks. The question for me isn't "what does it do for the company", the question is "what has happened to this company?" - why is FC logging in and not speaking? If he has time to log in, he has time to put up a simple post, time to reply to TAT etc.

FC not posting an official update is very different from halting all communication. Jutarul and some others said they spoke to FC some time this month and were told tape-out is still on track.

I would give FC a few more days to give us an official status update considering they might be working hard now to get shit done so they have an update to give us.