Thanks for all the nominations, we will wait another day for more. If there are more than 10, we will start a poll.

As discussed in the thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295168.0, OurAsic is going to design and manufacture a community supported 28nm ASIC for bitcoin mining. This thread is for nomination treasurers. Anyone can nominate a willing community member with a rating of 3 stars "Full Members" and over. You can also self nominate. After 3 days, we will create a poll, where every member can vote for up to 10 nominees. 10 nominees getting top votes will be selected.

We did not vanish. We were just doing further market research to make sure the project is feasible. We are more confidant than before in the community's ability to execute this project. First steps first, we need to select the treasurers. A new thread will be created to take nominations from the community. For the next 3 days, everyone would be able to nominate members of bitcointalk.org for the role of the treasurers. Only "Full Members", or "Sr Members" or "Hero Members" can be nominated. After 3 days, we will create a poll with a list of all the nominations. The poll will run for another 3 days. The top 10 members voted will be selected as treasurers.

In the meanwhile, we will be contacting different ASIC design companies to get formal quotes for the design.

What was stopping these "unknown groups" from buying a lot GPUs/FPGAs before ASICs? The goal of this project is to again make electricity a substantial cost for mining. Because electricity is something that is available at a relatively equal price for everyone.

We are open to suggestions about what steps to take to make our operation more transparent. One option is to put all the "we will do x and y" in the company bylaws and making the Executives/Board personally liable if they fail to honor the commitment.


14nm is still a dream. We will be talking to some companies this week to find out if it is even possible anytime soon. So far we know that we won't probably see 14nm ASICs until 2015.

We will let the community nominate and then vote for the treasurers.

We do not have any particular experience with ASIC design. However, majority of the work will be contracted to companies specializing in this. SHA-256 is not a very complicated algorithm, and designing an ASIC for this is relatively easy. We will also hire experienced people to help us make the right decisions.

Everything will be open-sourced, since it is funded by the community.

1. In Bitcoin mining some laws of regular economy don't hold. For example, there would be NO demand for ASICs, if there were no ASICs anywhere. People were still mining happily with GPUs/FPGAs. ASICs just increased the difficulty rate.
2. They have no other choice, we are here to give one.
3. If you read my post properly, you would find the answer to this question. We are not creating just "another" ASIC. We are creating a low cost ASIC ($100 - $200 for a 400 to 600 GHash/sec capacity chip).
4. Irrelevant question.

Once there is huge consensus that this is a good idea, we will disclose our public profiles. That being said, this proposal is not just for us. Others in the industry are more than welcome to step forward to take lead.


Exactly the reason why we proposed this solution.


14nm is the cutting edge. Only very few companies are making 14nm chips at this time. NRE costs for 14nm are even higher. We are still looking into it. We believe 28nm will still last for an year or so.

This is a very raw proposal yet. We have not selected any members yet, and will totally rely on the community to do this. We are also open to more suggestions about how we can do this more transparently, and what other steps we should take to ensure that we do not end up like other ASIC manufacturers.

Yes, its a Delaware corporation. We also own OurAsic.com (there is nothing there yet).

All the ASIC manufacturers are marred with greed, and will continue to suck blood out of the community until the community gets back in control.

ASIC Manufacturer Greed
The reason why the ASIC manufacturers are selling their products for a HIGH margin is, they want to mine themselves. And if they sell for cheap, they will get a lot of competition in mining. A 28nm chip costs at most $100 to manufacture (after the Non Recurring Engineering costs, which are about 1 to 1.5 million dollars). HashFast has already recouped their NRE costs from the sale of their first batch, but they are still selling their chips at 3500% of cost price for the second batch! They can easily make as much profit by selling a lot of chips for a lower price (around ~$200). But they are not doing this. Why? Because, by flooding the market with cheap ASICs, they will not be able to mine on their own. Right now electricity is a negligible cost associated with mining. But if there are a lot of people mining with the latest ASICs, the cost of electricity will once again become significant. Then, these companies will not be able to make much profit from mining.

Delaying a delivery is LEGAL!
In addition to that, they can always delay the delivery of the chips. Deliberately delaying the delivery of a product is NOT a crime, unless specifically ruled as fraud by a court in this special case of Bitcoin mining. Why would a company sell you a money printing machine and deliver it on time when they can delay the delivery and print money in the meantime without breaking any laws?

Getting back in control
Getting back in control is easy. We just have to flood the market wth a lot of cheap ASICs. This is possible (there is a proposal at the end of this post), economically feasible and attainable. How will this help? By flooding the market with cheap ASICs, we can:
1. Foil the evil plan of all the greedy ASIC manufacturers, since mining will no longer be SO MUCH profitable to them. They will have to start making profit from sales only, which will lead to competition and a much fair pricing.
2. Make mining affordable (and attainable) for everyone.
3. Secure the network, by properly decentralizing mining once again.

This will be kind of similar to the "Gentleman's Agreement" proposed by Satoshi in the earlier days of mining.

“We should have a gentleman’s agreement to postpone the GPU arms race as long as we can for the good of the network.  It’s much easier to get new users up to speed if they don’t have to worry about GPU drivers and compatibility.  It’s nice how anyone with just a CPU can compete fairly equally right now.” – Satoshi

Right now there is nothing "fair" about mining. The ASIC manufacturers, with millions of investment from the community, are light years ahead of everyone else. For them making the hardware is VERY cheap (~$200 for a complete 500 GHash/s miner using the 28nm technology), the cost of electricity is negligible. For every other Tom, Dick and Harry, the same machine will cost about $5000, and they probably won't get it until March/April next year, when it won't be worth anything.

The big hurdle
Making an ASIC chip is not something that anybody can do at home (unlike using GPUs or FPGAs for mining). There are a lot of upfront costs, known as NRE costs, to the tune of 1 to 2 million dollars. Majority of this investment goes into the ASIC design, and making the "die". The die is used to burn wafers. Once the die is made it can burn an unlimited amount of wafers. A single wafer burn (costing about $10,000) can produce about 150 chips. That comes to about $66 per chip. Packaging/testing of the chip is extra, which is not more than $50 per chip. So, once the NRE costs are collected, each new chip can be produced for about $100.

Solution:
In order to save the network, Bitcoin community has to get back in control. Here is our proposal. Our company will first develop an ASIC chip based on the 28nm technology. And later probably a 14nm one. We will do this 100% transparently by keeping the community in control! How this can be achieved:

• The community will elect 10 eminent members from the Bitcoin community (reputed Escrows, Group buyers) and we will appoint them as "treasurers" of the company. They do not have to US citizens. These treasurers will be in control of all the pre-order funds and will approve every expense.
  
• When the pre-order money for Non Recurring Engineering costs is raised, each treasurer will be in control of 1/10th of the company funds. Whenever there is a bill/invoice to pay, the office bearers of our company will send it to the treasurers for approval. Upon which, each treasurer will transfer 1/10th of the bill amount to the company's account. After making the payment, the company will send back the proof of payment/receipt to each treasurer.
  
• During the whole process the company will have to sign many NDAs, and would not be able to disclose all the invoices/receipts to public. However, since these treasurers will be a part of the company legally, we would be allowed to show the receipts to them.
  
• All the expenses would be disclosed publicly.
  
• Since the biggest cost (and barrier to entry) is the die. We will instruct the fab to release the die to "public domain". That means, any company can place an order from the fab without having to invest in any NREs. This will lead to a healthier competition.
  
• We will not take any salaries, compensations etc., but we will earn a fixed pre-determined small mark-up from the sales as profit.

OurAsic
We are a group of Bitcoin veterans who have invested (and like most others lost a lot) in the ASIC manufacturing companies. OurAsic Inc. is a Delaware corporation. We are located all over the USA, but plan the headquarter the company in Silicon Valley (SF Bay Area, CA). We plan to make a 28nm chip with a capacity of 400 to 600 Ghash/sec (we will get better estimates of the actual value when we start the process, but we are 99% confident that it will be in this range). We will sell the first batch of 10,000 chips at $200/chip to collect 2 million dollars. As proposed above, the money will remain in control of the treasurers. Once the NRE money is collected, it will take us about 4 to 5 months to ship the chips to the customers. (2 months for designing the chip, simulations, etc. and 2-3 months for the tape-out, burning, testing, packaging, etc.) If we start today, we can have the chips in our hands by late January. During this time, we will release the chip specs, sample circuit schematics, Gerbers, BOMs etc. so that OEMs can start designing/manufacturing their units. The subsequent batches will be even cheaper at about ~$100/chip (fabs give huge discounts for large quantities).

PLEASE NOTE:
Lets please keep the discussion on this topic limited to whether this is feasible and to gauge the interest of the community in such a project. We will start another thread to discuss our ability/legitimacy, and to introduce our team.

We are a group of people who have been involved with Bitcoin for a long time now. We have all mined Bitcoins in the past. But recently we have been losing money (like most others) by investing in Bitcoin mining hardware (especially ASICs). We are here to propose a new community driven approach to making ASICS. By the community, for the community. Please whitelist us, so that we can make this proposal. If people like it, they can stop investing into scrupulous businesses.