Bitcoin kaufen offline

Amid the loud grandstanding in the ASIC wars, one quiet player has been keeping its powder dry. KnCMiner, a joint venture between an IT consulting firm and a chip designer, recently opened up preorders for its bitcoin mining products. And this week, it announced increases in the performance specifications for its two units, increasing them to a maximum 200 and 400 Gg/s. Sam Cole, cofounder of the company, explains that it prefers to under promise and over deliver. CoinDesk spoke to him about the company’s plans.

KnCMiner was conceived in January 2012, when four year-old Swedish IT consulting firm KennemarAndCole AB (KNC) got interested in bitcoins. Along with co-founder Andreas Kennemar, Cole began mining the cryptocurrency on GPUs, but wanted to increase their computing power, so he placed an order with “hardware vendors who are now our competitors, ” he says. He was frustrated by constant delays.

KNC contacted a Swedish design house called ORSOC, with a view to designing an ASIC miner. ORSOC, which specializes in designing chips and getting them fabricated, wanted more information. Cole and his team set up a website to monitor interest, delivering the information gleaned from that site back to ORSOC.

“Andreas and I saw a hole in the market. We realized that we couldn’t do it on our own, so the best thing to do was to get a design company on board at the same level. They share the risk and the reward. They get heavily rewarded, but only if it succeeds.”

Who does what

Responsibilities are carved up pretty neatly between the two companies. ORSOC handles the back-end design work for the chips and the rest of the mining product. KNC handles the front-of-house activites, including administration, reporting, and web sites.

Working with a chip designer has its advantages. The firm is promising a 28 nm ASIC design, which compares favorably to the 110 nm design used by BitSynCom for its Avalon chips, and the 65 nm design used by Butterfly Labs. But it’s doing this for a reason.