Quote from: notme on July 23, 2013, 05:26:07 AM

Quote from: Endlessa on July 23, 2013, 04:30:53 AM

Yes please link citation of being registered as a Chinese business. That would be news

There is this:

Quote from: friedcat on July 02, 2012, 12:23:42 PM

Hi everyone. Our team has just started a project of mining ASIC design & production. We believe it will be both profitable for us and good for the Bitcoin community if we fully work it out.

It is widely believed that the NRE cost of ASIC is very high, while the margin cost of mass ASIC production is very low. However, we happen to be in China, where the NRE cost is much more reasonable (~150k$ for 130nm, ~500k$ for 65nm, furthermore much less if you do a 1/N mask) than most people thought. And we are going to take well advantage of that.

Our approach is incremental in all aspects. We will set several milestones and see what will happen if we achieve each of them. The report on each stage will be posted here.

In the design stage, including both the front-end and the back-end, we are going to fund ourselves. When we are finally ready to turn our design into real chips, we will seek investments, possibly both inside and outside the Bitcoin world. The first batch of our ASIC will not be an end, and we are going to renew our technology with the evolution of the hardware industry, so we are going to make this project a long-term one. However, this thread is not for investment asking, but merely for discussion and our status report.

Open discussions (feel free to add more!)

1. Self mining .vs. Selling hashes .vs. Selling hardware

2. Warnings, e.g. what are the typical causes to a failed ASIC manufacturing

3. Approaches to get enough funding for production

(To be extended)

Status reports

July 18
We have had our IC design company registered at Shenzhen, China. The name of our company is "bitfountain"

We also have signed the confidential contract with the IC manufacturer and got the process library necessary for correct DC synthesis.

July 29

Front-end work done. Preliminary specification given.

August 2

More optimization and trade-offs applied. MH/J improved and Watt/mm^2 reduced at the cost of some chip area increase.

August 11

The pictures of our IC layer are revealed.

(Larger pictures: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg1092138#msg1092138)

September 22
We are in the taping-out process with the foundry. The chip spec and interface made public.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=91173.msg1211518#msg1211518

(To be extended)

Or this:

Quote from: tucenaber on August 15, 2012, 10:57:31 AM

Quote from: kibblesnbits on August 14, 2012, 02:18:53 PM

Could you give us the results of your chat with friedcat? Inquiring minds want to know. Thanks

I have received some documents, and from what I can tell the company Bitfountain, is registered july 12 in Shenzhen China. I have also received the names of the partners where only two is actually officially shareholders but the third (the hardware wizkid) will be added later on I am told. The names are the same as the owners of Bitfountain, so that's good. There seems to be an agreement with a manufacturer, but I cannot say if that's legit or not.

I have not (yet) been able to make up my mind about the viability of the project, or gotten any assurances. But Friedcat seems trustworthy and he's a Haskell* programmer, and what scammer would be a Haskell programmer? That's like a contradiction in terms, lol.

We'll see.

*) Haskell=obscure programming language, of which I am a fan.

Or lots of other posts discussing Bitfountain. The emphasis is mine in both posts.

Surely you realize this does not constitute proof of registration, in China or anywhere else.