Cryoniks Frostbit Asic Miner, claimed to produce 1000GH/s. Company also claims an on-board liquid nitrogen generator to cool down the hardware while consuming 2800 watts/hr with a price tag of $14,995. All these stats looks impressive on paper but in reality company failed to provide a video demonstration or picture of a real working unit / under construction unit. They had posted few 3D images and some sci-fi facts and most of them seems shady.

Last week Tech Crunch posted an article on Cryoniks (check here) and they have pulled the article with in 24 hours. Redditor hak8or described in a reddit comment why Cryoniks Frostbit might be just another Asic scam.

Now, we all have seen how large the heatsinks are for the 10 Ghash/s cards from asicminer, right? They are quite large, and even have fans to cool them. This machine apparently does 100x the hash rate, so we can safely assume it gives off at least ten times the heat. To give off that heat fast enough so that the temperature does not rise to burning temperatures, you need to shift it to another medium, be it air, water, or even liquid nitrogen, faster than it is generated. On this box, we do not see any sort of radiators, heatsinks, air holes, fans, or even seems for air to flow through. How on earth will they radiate heat quick enough?!

They are for some reason using liquid nitrogen somehow to cool the chips, but then you have to think, hm, well, the heat does not just disappear, as that would defy a good bit of laws regarding physics, and more specifically, violate conservation of energy, unless of course they are using a patent pending process of turning energy into raw matter as per E=MC^2! Don’t forget, that the very act of circulating liquid nitrogen is an energy intensive process, so you are injecting more energy into the loop, causing even more heat. Not to mention, it takes a very sexy compressor to change Nitrogen from gas at 1 ATM to a high enough pressure to make it turn into liquid. Such a compressor is very large, very expensive, very heavy, and uses massive amounts of energy.

hak8or also explained the false claims by company on their FAQ page, no part of their so-called FAQ makes any sense.

• Drawing Nitrogen gas directly from the environment, the FrostBit™ Cryonic System features nano-isolating membranes specifically designed to reject other smaller atmospheric gases.

This does exist actually and is not that crazy. It is used in things like (very rarely) gas masks for example. Such technology is also used in specifically situations exactly like this, when you want to pump a gas out of another mixture of gasses so you can compress that gas for either storage or to liquefy it, often in academic settings. Howe ever, it is not called a “Nano-isolating Membrane”, but I sadly forgot the name and a quick google does not give me anything. Hopefully someone else can chime in and say it.

• We’ve taken ASIC processing to the next level with our patent pending ASIC+ Cryonic Architecture™ featuring select low-temperature superconducting materials.

And how much do you figure it costs to set up a chip fab to use exotic materials? A normal fab capable of 110 nm costs millions upon millions of dollars, using standard materials. And these people quietly built such a fab, all by themselves, out of nowhere? If it was indeed this easy, Intel and TSMC would have been using such technology for years by now. Not to mention needing the know-how of a good bit of PHD’s in material sciences and physics. We are talking stuff that if were true, would be very ground breaking and have many applications for customers who are willing to pay a pretty penny, such as the DOD and space programs, yet we do not see anything like this yet, so it probably has yet to happen.

• We use custom-built condensers featuring environmentally inert Helium Compression Technology to rapidly cool and condense collected dry nitrogen gas into high-purity liquid nitrogen to directly cool our processors.

What has Helium have to do with this? And how are they using it to rapidly cool and condense nitrogen? But here is a very key thing that shows just how little they understand what this mining business is, their use of the word processors. Never, not once, have the mining chips been called processors, anywhere, instead they are called Asics, and for good reason. They are just brute forcing hashes, nothing more, nothing less. There is little to no processing involved. I personally feel that this is the dead giveaway.

• During the first 24 hours, Nitrogen gas from the environment will be collected and stored within leaving a slightly Oxygen rich environment. NEVER run your FrostBit™ Cryonic Bit mining units running near an open flame. See the provided Safety & Maintenance Guide for more information.

If the nitrogen being sucked out of the air quickly part was true, then they are actually right here. Less nitrogen in the air, which currently takes up about 3/4 of all air (wikipedia.org),  which result in much more oxygen being in the area, which would result in a very dangerous situation. After all, this is how a few of the Apollo astronauts died during a test, they had an oxygen rich environment during testing, which resulted in a massive fire, burning them all to death or asphyxiating them. And too much oxygen as well as too little nitrogen can kill you, hence why divers always keep an eye on how much O2 and Nitrogen they have left. Too much of either one results in death.

• CAN I USE MY FROSTBIT™ CRYONIC UNIT TO MINE FOR LITECOIN, PROCESS VIDEO, OR ANYTHING ELSE? Our team will continue to make it possible to upgrade your FrostBit™ 1000 Cryonic Bit mining unit to allow for additional unit capabilities

So they have either made a godly chip which is very reconfigurable, allowing for using both massively different Scrypt and SHA-256 algorithms, without any physical changes, or they included ASIC implementations of both algo’s separately on the same Asics, or lastly but most likely, they are just scamming you!

You can read full post of hack8or here.

Conclusion : We always encourage our readers to stay away from new companies unless they have a good video / image demonstration of their product. You can always stay updated with us on Twitter, Facebook and E-mail.

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