ASICMiner
ASICMiner (烤猫矿机) was a bitcoin mining venture offered to outside investors on the BitcoinTalk securities board. The opening post, by the user friedcat, is dated 9 August 2012 and is titled "ASICMINER: Entering the Future of ASIC Mining by Inventing It".[1]
No dissolution, sale or last operating day appears in that announcement thread.
The forum banner on the thread, as displayed when the thread was read on 18 September 2026, warns that moderators do not remove likely scams, and that one or more users have reported that they strongly believe the topic creator is a scammer. The same banner says the site does not verify that report.[1]
Company structure
Friedcat described ASICMINER as a virtual identity held by investors in a company called Bitfountain. Bitfountain's business, in that post, was mining with ASIC devices the group built, and selling those devices. At the time of the post, ASICMINER shareholders were said to hold 163,962 shares and Bitfountain shareholders 236,038 shares.
The post gave ASICMINER shares two stated privileges. They were to receive all net profits up to 0.1 BTC per share from the day dividends began. They were also exempt from dilution, so that each ASICMINER share was said to equal 1/400,000 of the combined profit and voting power of ASICMINER and Bitfountain together. Income, after ASICMINER's preferential slice, was to be split between the two groups once maintenance, labour and research costs were taken. The post counted mining income, bitcoin sales and fiat income that had been turned into bitcoin.[1]
The same post said there was no public exchange the group had approved, and that the group would not sell shares without a public announcement. Private purchases from earlier investors were the route named at that moment, with or without a third-party escrow. The project itself said it did not provide escrow, and that a trade had to be registered in its database before a dividend would follow the transfer.
The GLBSE sale
A follow-up the same day said 30,000 shares were already posted as an ask on GLBSE under the asset name ASICMINER, and that the ticker had been created more than a week earlier while the details were still being checked. A later answer the same morning said unsold shares might be sold later, at a higher price if a first batch of chips succeeded, and that no more than 200,000 shares would be created and sold.[1]
The question-and-answer post set a minimum fundraising target of US$100,000 and said a raise above that figure would be treated as a successful IPO. It also said the group would have preferred about US$120,000 to US$140,000 because a minimum budget was exposed to surprises. If the IPO were cancelled, the post said 100.5 percent of raised funds would be returned. Extra shares promised to larger buyers were to be sent only once the IPO was treated as successful, so that a full refund would not move value from small buyers to large ones inside GLBSE's identical-share system.
Friedcat wrote that partners were in China, that two of them had integrated-circuit backgrounds, and that the reason for selling shares before a foundry tape-out was time.
First chip
The opening post specified a generation-1 chip called the Block Eruptor. It said the chip was a 130 nm part at 6 to 8 joules per gigahash. Rated frequency was 336 MHz at 1.05 V. Because the design was said to do one hash per cycle, that rating was presented as 336 MH/s. The post said the chips ran stably at 392 MH/s at 1.15 V, and that further overclocking needed care with heat and power. Hashrate figures are the ratings in the announcement.[1]
The cost discussion in the same question post attributed a low budget to the 130 nm node, multi-level-mask wafers, low EDA licence fees and labour costs in China, and in-house RTL work.
Delivery timing in the thread was a forecast. One reply said a foundry mask set typically took 45 to 60 days, so a best case was a working chip in October 2012, with November called a little conservative, and with hashing hoped for inside that year if the chip worked. The post also said failure was possible.
See also
- Mining hardware
- ASIC