special discounts for shareholders would cut into the profit and thus shareholders dividend. So those shareholders not buying anything would be left with less dividend, paying for the discount of the shareholders using the discount. So no, I don't think it would be a wise thing to offer discounts to shareholders. Also, with 400k total shares basically all of bitcoinland could own one...
Of course I am not saying that ASICMINER should offer some kind of massive, margin eating discount. Also: It's not like any of the ASIC products are established products or even 'iPod plug and play'. We are talking about a product with a so far relatively small circle of people with the competence and interest in using it.
Of course, I want to see ASICMINER succeed, but I still like the idea of them 'testing out' their product using their share holders as a 'early adopter' base. I think it would be more then fair to assume that the people that frequent this forum, trade in BTC Stock and mine already are pretty much the best 'spokespeople' that ASICMINER could ask for when (hopefully) gearing up for mass production of BTC mining equipment.
I also don't see the 'harm' in 'rewarding' people who have already given them a vote of confidence by investing in them with a chance to try out a product before it hits 'market'.
You give some interesting suggestions. All of that is nice to have. But think about it. How does it maximize profit for shareholders in any way? It's more like a wish list of what would be great without digging a little deeper. What i meant with my "dumbest comment" you have ever seen or so is the following:
What Friedcat and his team do is developing, (producing,) deploying, operating and selling mining hardware. The one big goal of doing that is to maximize profits for shareholders. However, to achieve maximum profits they have to take a lot of management decisions, for example the decison to start selling hardware now, the decision to sell hardware in auctions and not for a fixed price etc. etc. And believe me that is what they are really really good at and where the true value of this company comes from: the team. Now, in all the decisions they took, they maximized profits for their shareholders, be it the auctioning of hardware (maximizing profits) or the coming huge success (mark my words) of mining bee usb sticks. I just dont believe they will give their products to shareholders cheaper or earlier because it's kind of nice or whatever. And anyway that would not make sense.
