ASICMiner.

ASICMiner was one of the first makers of chips built only for mining bitcoin, known as ASICsASICA machine built to do nothing but Bitcoin mining: chips that hash trillions of times a second, far beyond any ordinary computer.. It was the name under which Bitfountain, a chip company in China, sold shares to the public, and it was run by a software developer known online as Friedcat. To pay for the chips it sold the shares for bitcoin: in August 2012 it listed them at 0.1 BTC each on GLBSE, an online stock exchange that traded in bitcoin, and promised shareholders weekly dividends.

Unlike other chip makers of the time, ASICMiner kept its first machines and mined with them itself. They were switched on in February 2013. At first most of their work went to BTC Guild, a public pool, the Bitcoin developer Gregory Maxwell wrote that April, as BTC Guild neared half of all mining. From 20 May 2013 ASICMiner found blocks under its own name, and in June, its busiest month, it found almost one block in five. Each of its blocks paid the whole reward to one ASICMiner address. That was the company’s own income from mining, separate from the transactions confirmed inside the block. From mid-2013 it also sold machines, such as the Block Erupter, a miner the size of a USB stick.

Its blocks grew rarer as faster machines from other makers joined the network. 8btc, translating a 2018 report by the Chinese outlet AI Caijing, said that by October 2013 its second generation of chips was lagging behind, while rivals such as Bitmain gained ground. Its last block, 294,915, was found on 9 April 2014, and no announcement that it had stopped mining has been found. mempool.space also lists one block from 31 May 2021, 685,643, under ASICMiner’s name, but that block was F2Pool’s: it carries F2Pool’s name and pays F2Pool’s address.