Not trying to throw the hate on or anything, but I do know quite a bit about ASIC manufacturing, and if you're still shopping around for a mass manufacturer, your delivery date is at least six months away. Are the first units in December doing to be wafer sharing runs? If so, how are you getting the density to do 27 GHash/s? Assuming 300 MHz transistor technology - which might be available through a wafer share - a 27 GHash/s unit would require something like 100 million transistors. That's not wafer sharing territory...

Updated:

The LargeCoin Announce list is split on the issue:

Unless you want to spend $5-10M in NRE, you're going with a structured ASIC process. eASIC and Alterra HardCopy are the only options here. Chips will be capable of 2GHash/s each, approximately. So, assuming BFL is using a structured ASIC process to keep NRE less than millions, they'd need 500 ASICs to generate a terahash. Unit costs are small if you produce 10,000s of ASICs; however, when your production is in the hundreds or low thousands, you're looking at $100s per unit. That terahash box has a cost base of $500K, by our estimation.

Yes, we certainly are. And so should everyone in the ASIC business, including Intel. If BFL's numbers are to be believed, our assertion is that they have discovered new manufacturing processes that are vastly more efficient than anything the semiconductor industry has seen before.

If they received any venture capital, they would have had to file an exempt distribution form with the SEC. They have not done this. A search for "Butterfly" in EDGAR reveals nothing of Butterfly Labs, Inc.

C'mon, guys, if you did a financing, let us know the details...

http://www.sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/companysearch.html

This is a great idea; however, let me set some expectations for the community regarding the cost of producing an ASIC. With ASICs, you have four different choices:

1. Academic "wafer sharing" - this lets you get a very simple design fabricated on a very "old" technology. Wafer sharing doesn't allow for large volume production - it's for research projects. However, wafer sharing is cheap.

2. Structured ASIC - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_ASIC_platform; this lets you relatively easily transition from an FPGA to an ASIC design, using a chip that has the first few layers already populated with an array of standard logic. Essentially, you just provide the wires to connect up the logic in the way you want it. Expect to invest close to $1M to produce the first run of a structured ASIC design.

3. Standard Cell - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_cell; this lets you build your own ASIC by assembling networks of standardized components. All of the layers of the chip are up to you. The cost of a standard cell design using recent processes these days is $5M - $10M.

4. Full Custom - Faggedabahtit; full custom designs achieve the best possible performance, but rely on literally designing the entire chip from the ground up. Companies like Intel use full custom processes to highly optimize their processors for the absolute maximum performance. Cost: $100M and up.

Given these four options, a community designed ASIC is probably best served by the wafer sharing model. However, if enough people can put their heads together to raise $1M or so, a structured design would definitely provide the best ROI. If Bitcoin explodes in popularity and the mining / transaction reward can be measured in $10Ms per month, then standard cell or full custom designs will be funded easily.

For everyone's convenience, I'll answer this again:

1. We're located in Vancouver, BC, Canada.

2. We're incorporated federally, and here's our incorporation information page:

https://www.ic.gc.ca/app/scr/cc/CorporationsCanada/fdrlCrpDtls.html?corpId=7952988&V_TOKEN=1331589171870&crpNm=largecoin&crpNmbr=&bsNmbr=

In Canada, there is only one kind of corporation - we don't have the concept of LLCs, C-corps, etc..

To each his own.

Expected delivery is July 2012. If we miss our delivery deadline, then we will return deposits in full.

... we have received many orders. We're quickly eating up the first 25, so please fill in the order form soon if you don't want to miss out. In the spirit of openness, we are already at 31 orders and counting, but it's assumed that some people won't fill out the deposit so please do get your order in.

Okay, everyone. We've read the forums, and have carefully considered the ROI calculations that have been submitted by various of you. We have also talked to many of you by telephone. After much research and contemplation, we have decided to offer the first 25 customers who order a C200 unit by April 15 a 50% discount on our initial price of $30,000 per unit to ensure that we can establish trust with an initial group of customers. This means the deposit amount is reduced to $2,250 per unit, and the unit cost is reduced to just $15,000.

This is a fantastic offer, and since sending out an announcement to our list less than an hour ago, we have received

If you wish to make an order, please visit our order form: http://bit.ly/A53ShJ

Q&A

1. What will happen if my order is #26? Will I still get a discount?

No, we are only offering this discount on first first 25 orders received by April 15, 2012. If your order is not in the first 25, or if we receive it after April 15, then you will be placed on a waiting list, which we will fill if someone from the first 25 orders fails to provide their deposit in a timely manner.

2. Will the price be reduced after April 15?

Probably not. We still believe that $30,000 per unit represents good value when you consider the long term growth of Bitcoin and the potential of a difficulty increase to quickly erase any ROI difference with FPGA-based offerings.

3. Will you offer a smaller unit that costs less?

Not until at lease late 2012. For now, we need to focus on shipping to a small number of eager customers who can validate that our technology works, and help to evangelize LargeCoin to a larger audience of smaller customers in future.

4. Can I order more than one unit at this price?

Yes, you can order multiple units. We have placed an arbitrary cap of 5 units per customer; however, if you have a strong interest in ordering more than 5 units at this time, please contact us. We will consider larger orders on a case by case basis.

5. Who will the escrow agent be?

We are still working this out. When we have the escrow details ready, everyone who has filled in our order form will receive an email from us with a copy of the escrow agreement and full details of the escrow agent. Everyone will have plenty of time to do their own diligence on the escrow agent and the agreement before sending any deposit funds.

6. Why should I trust you guys?

You don't have to trust us. Your money will be escrowed, and we won't use any of it until the devices have been validated by an independent third party as ready for shipping. We won't even take your final payment until you have received the product. This is the reason behind our DRM mechanism, which allows you to try the device for 30 days after receiving it, without giving us any money.

PM me or make a post if you have any additional questions not answered here.

As I think I said earlier, your mom probably doesn't have a Bitcoin ASIC in her basement computer. This means botnets can't harvest nearly as much horsepower as will be available when ASIC computation is ubiquitous in the Bitcoin network. Just as FPGAs are rapidly growing in prevalence and replacing GPUs, ASICs will eventually replace FPGAs. LargeCoin's goal is stay on top of the ASIC trend and profit over the long run as Bitcoin comes into widespread use.

Bitcoin has been through more hard knocks than most well funded startups could possibly handle, and is still going strong. I don't see a reason why it won't be around in 10 years time, and by then many orders of magnitude larger and more interesting.

One day someone will build a standard cell based ASIC for Bitcoin mining, and that will cost $5-10M NRE and it will be a monster.

This is quite true. The cost of fabrication is extensive, and much of that cost is for very very experienced engineers to validate the design before it is manufactured. Silicon wafers, and the literal fabrication process are only part of the cost. It's easy to understate the complexity of putting together an integrated circuit. We're talking about tens of millions of transistors, complex timing circuits, and little tiny wires that all have to fit together perfectly to result in a working product.

FPGAs are a great because they provide power efficiency within an order of magnitude of the ASIC, but without having to worry whether your simulation of the metal layout might not work just right with the lithography process. Unfortunately, FPGAs carry with them a couple of serious drawbacks versus ASICs:

1. FPGAs use a lot more logic to implement the same amount of logic. That logic eats up power.

2. FPGAs themselves are very complicated chips with high fabrication costs. That keeps the unit cost high even at high production volumes.

In our exploration last year of various options for increasing the efficiency of Bitcoin mining, we thoroughly evaluated the FPGA options, because of course using FPGAs instead of ASICs would have greatly sped things up and reduced our risk. But, what we discovered was that the power, space, and unit cost efficiencies of ASICs will always win out over FPGAs in the long run.

So, if you believe that Bitcoin is going to be around for many years to come, as we do, then you'll want to make a long term bet on ASICs rather than loading up on FPGAs that will be left in the dust as the difficulty factor is pushed higher by ASICs. Short term calculations based on today's difficulty factor and exchange rate are just not relevant. If your goal is short term profit and you fear the future of Bitcoin, then stick with FPGAs.

I am very pleased that there are others like Butterfly Labs who seem to also be working with ASICs. This is great news for Bitcoin - the more custom logic that gets pushed out there, the lower the risk that Bitcoin will be co-opted by botnets operated by nefarious groups. Because, last time I checked, your mom's PC didn't have a Bitcoin ASIC in it.

I actually didn't know that escrow.com exists.

We only have enough chips in our first run to build 25 units. We don't want to run more than this off the presses until we know that there's enough demand for these ASICs. Once the first batch is out, it will be relatively easy and quick to produce more. Yes, future prices will probably be lower, given Moore's law.

The escrow will be with a Canadian law firm based in Vancouver, British Columbia; escrow funds will be held in a lawyer's trust account in accordance with stringent trust account rules of the BC Law Society. I will be happy to share the escrow agreement with the forum when it's ready for release.

These are all legitimate concerns, and I'd have many of the same concerns if I was considering putting $4,500 into escrow, let alone spending $30K on a box. Let me take each of your points in turn:

1. $4500 is enough to build a fake and run off with the pre-orders.

I'd suggest you could build a fake for even less than $4,500. But in this case, we can't run off with the $4,500 because it will be sitting in a trust account with a law firm. That money won't be released to us until the units are validated to be working consistent with the specifications in the escrow agreement with each customer. Having the money in escrow helps us to know there's demand for the units, but we're not drawing on those funds in any way until shipment happens.

2. No one knows for sure you can accomplish this.

I can't argue this point.

3. You have no reputation, or testimonials of your past accomplishments.

True. Here is my LinkedIn profile: http://linkd.in/zh5OFB, and that of the co-founder: http://linkd.in/ynNuuO. These are consistent with LargeCoin Inc.'s incorporation data, which is available from Industry Canada: http://bit.ly/AkqCwM

As you can see from our LinkedIn profiles, the founders have product management experience with semiconductor companies, investment experience, and years of experience building and running technology companies.

4. I want to see your face, and more of web presence with an address and phone number

Check the LinkedIn profile. Or, fill in the order form http://bit.ly/zliQFj and I'll call you so that we can chat live.

5. You can't start small by selling low cost systems as part of building your rep between now and July?

No, this is impractical. The major hurdle is producing the ASIC, which just takes time. And, as others have pointed out, costs money too.

Best of luck with that.