My research and conversation with smart dudes has led me to the conclusion that selling hardware is much more important than growing the mining farm. This is not to say that mining is worthless in comparison, bit that it's profitability is very temporary.
We need to be much more keen on hardware sales than begging AM to get to 50TH, 200TH, 1000TH.
Furthermore, it can be argued that AM should abuse its dominant position to the point of rapid commoditization of mining equipment, because that is where things will end up. It is better for them to reap the rewards, than to wait for more players to enter the market.
They should then use their resources to transcend the mining hardware/farm market altogether. Ideally they would time this right at the tipping point of total commoditization, and get into a tertiary market like custom decryption for governments, or alternative ASIC designs for other purposes than bitcoin.
This is almost spot on from my analysis. Since we *can* leverage the virtual monopoly power we currently have on hash rate with only the cost of the datacenter they're deployed in (compared to the cost of making the hardware, which is the same if we sell them or use them ourselves), we *should* take advantage of the opportunity as long as the additional deployment costs versus BTC mining rewards are minimal. But once we lose that advantage when other ASIC developers start performing on par, we need to quickly but deliberately shift to an emphasis on primarily selling hardware, with mining only as much as is necessary for development and testing, or to the extent that we need hash rate for marketing purposes (think ads saying, "buy the same hardware the #1 miner uses",) and the core of the business should be to let someone else buy the bulk of our shovels to mine with. This first shift point is coming, and soon. Perhaps in mere weeks, but certainly in no more than 6 months. I predict that in the long term, it's going to cycle like this: We increase our own in-house deployment to mine at a disruptively high hash rate -> miners lose advantage and need more equipment to keep up -> we sell more equipment -> (mini cycle here where miners compete among themselves for a while, driving more equipment sales) -> eventual equilibrium -> we develop nextgen devices -> we increase mining disruptively, etc... the internal mining by AM is really just the catalyst for the equipment sales.
Additionally, while it's intriguing, one problem I see with the tertiary market idea is that those services will almost certainly be paid in fiat (especially from governments), and if revenue is large enough, conversion for BTC dividends could be a bit disruptive to the BTC spot price - in BTC's favor, certainly, but still disruptive. I think it's a good idea for a spinoff.
