[Note: This is a slightly updated version of a post I made on reddit yesterday]
A new ASIC service/product just hit Sina Weibo (though it is not currently trending on Baidu or Weibo). They have announced that their ASIC mining systems for Scrypt will be turned on around June 1, 2014. They estimate that their product is faster than GPU mining in terms of hash / power consumption (~300 kh/s at 5W versus 160W for a Radeon 7850).
SF are accepting pre-sales for shares into this company (similar to ASICMiner business model). For 0.5 BTC you can buy 1 share of stock (until January 20th, today, when it goes up to 0.7 BTC).
Very little is known about the company, there are no personal names (the laoban could be Li Jun, 李钧) or business addresses attached to it. If you create an account and log into the system the share availability fluctuates widely but it is not clear why. Yesterday it went from 690 to 802 in about 10 minutes and it is currently, as of this writing, at 1022.
According to his Weibo account, the founder of SilverFish is purportedly the same guy who founded a large Chinese BTC and LTC mining pool, F2Pool and another major website yibite.com.1 Both he and the operations are located in Beijing.
According to ifeng.com (a Chinese financial news site), the CEO of Yibite.com is 李钧 (Li Jun). And according to a comment on reddit, this same mysterious CEO/COO also supposedly worked on Avalon / 阿瓦隆, the first successful ASIC mining machine for BTC. Perhaps Guo Yifu (郭义夫) may know who if Li Jun is the mysterious CEO/COO since he also works on the Avalon project.
However, until they show a video of the actual chips with screenshots of the hashing results, do your due diligence. For example, one other comment mentioned the boondoggle that was/is ScriptASIC.org. And another example, a couple weeks ago I wrote an in-depth article about similar credibility and claims issues with the Alpha Tech Scrypt ASIC. I will update this post if I find anything new.
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- A reddit comment says it is one of the biggest pools, it may be, at least as the hashrates could collectively be part of P2Pool. However if you look at the hashrate pool comparison charts LTC / BTC, F2Pool is not listed. Thus it is likely part of P2Pool. [↩]