A company started on July 18, 2012. After six years, the head of the company, its ideological inspirer and founder, remains in the shadows. Who is the person with the nickname FriedCat? Nobody knows.
Creators of ASICminer didn’t follow the standard way of finding investments, but decided to act innovatively: the company’s shares in the seed-phase were divided among investors, and the rest went to the stock exchange.
In the first quarter of 2013, a first chip from ASICminer entered the market. It was relatively inexpensive — the development cost the company $ 150,000.
First generation of miners had sturdy characteristics: a hashrate of 10 Gh/s and power consumption of about 100 watts. Blade Block Erupter plate gave twice as much efficiency as the FPGA of that time.
ASICminer was the pioneer of mining data centers: plates can be installed in standard 19” server racks. The first batch was bought out in the first hour, and the auctions were carried out only among the shareholders. The cost of one device was $ 12,500. The overall performance of all devices was 40 Th/s, which is almost two times more effective than the entire Bitcoin network. The efficiency of the data center allowed to lead in the industry for several months.
Blade Block Erupter v.2 was the next step in the development of ASICminer. Its price was $ 7,500 at the start of sales in April 2013. The miners’ hopes were justified, and in the summer company released an improved model of the ASICminer Cube (price — $ 7,000). The device could boast a performance of 36 Gh/s with power consumption of 430 watts.
A single-chip portable version of USB Block Erupter can be called a failed ASICminer experiment. Its capacity was 330 Mh/s. Due to the low cost (about 1 Bitcoin at the rate of 2013), the miner caused a hectic interest, but within a few months the hype went down to zero.
In the late summer of 2013, competitors began to put pressure on ASICminer, and the company’s shares began to fall. Only in 2014, a company managed to re-enter the market, but products are hopelessly outdated. Soon FriedCat disappeared, taking with him the remaining money.
That’s how bright and short life of ASICminer ended. But it’s giving a powerful impulse to the development of modern type miners.
We say goodbye to you until next week. Wait for the new chapter of the history of mining with Minerall.io!