Obviously Bitcoin is too small a universe to have had a similar company yet. But I am reminded of South African gold mining companies in the 1970s, where companies would rapidly and regularly pay out dividends bigger than their IPO.

Update
About the argument of dividend payments, our view is that we will distribute the net income after necessary costs are excluded and funds for foreseeable future (expansion, gen-2 chips) are reserved. Bitcoin is already an investment itself having a great potential. Any investment, no matter how profitable, based on "turning Bitcoins to fiat first" requires double consideration. We can invest the RMBs to bonds and they are almost bound to be more profitable than just holding the RMBs, but we can never say the same to Bitcoins.

So we feel that it is most responsible to let the shareholders decide how to do with the abundant Bitcoins. We will of course find other investments (which are focused on helping the Bitcoin economy therefore benefit all Bitcoin holders), but they are all involved in different risk and return model than a mining/mining hardware company. So if there are new investments, they will be as new adventures, in new collaboration structures, and after a significant period of time since ASICMINER is always the most important job for us to do before the company could gradually run itself with a little less founder involvement.

Or, maybe it reminds me of dot com companies around 2000. Not that those companies didn't have great ideas that would play out in the long run, just that they were all horrendously overvalued and awash with competition (ex. Cisco and Amazon, which both crashed ~90% and took a decade to recover).

This venture is indeed the most successful, but is it worth 1.6 million bitcoins?