Quote from: Professor James Moriarty on September 02, 2014, 11:41:34 PM

I would like to ask ( btw I have not even a single clue so don't hesitate to eli5 this)

How much capital would one need to start a business and get asic chips at lowest price from a manufacturer or make one yourself?

I am guessing (assuming?) getting couple of chips and reverse engineer it and make thousands of the same stuff would be costly if not impossible.

So lets assume this scenario , I get 10-20 scrypt asic miner chips , pay someone to reverse engineer and find out how its made , go to a chip factory with him , explain the manufacturer how it should be made with him and pay them to make couple thousand at least. How much capital would this take?

Or any other example you might have in your mind.

TL;DR , how much would i need to have to become next asicminer,gawminer company.

1. Approx $10M from start to finish, but for something that is cryptocurrency related. It's closer to $5M if you have a team already selected and existing IP. This assumes a 28nm process target.
2. You can't reverse engineer ASICs anymore. There are 100 million transistors on there, and nobody is going to figure out what it's doing by looking at a mask layer. Besides, you don't need to reverse engineer anything. The algorithms are well-known already.
3. You can't make just thousands of ASICs. Volumes need to be in the 100k minimum, and it really needs to be in the millions for them to take you seriously. You can't just walk into a fab and expect them to make some for you anyways; you have to know what you are doing and have relationships with the fab companies. Most Bitcoin ASIC people don't have this BTW, and get really shafted on the wafer prices.

Is this just idle speculation?

Silverpike

Posts

Merits