I say well done to Big Picture Mining Cooperative for producing this product in the timescale they did. I am quite comfortable with the idea of letting BPMC mine rather than sell. Now they have shown it is possible, I look forward to seeing a second run at (hopefully) a lower price. I don't expect an extreme ROI but a price closer to break even (for us) would be easier to contemplate.
Alas, this thread also shows how easily disappointment can turn to anger.
The reason is that everyone is waiting for a reasonably priced piece of hardware that is ready to ship. Pricing out of the ballpark for anyone who is reasonable leads to anger because everyone wants to get into the game but doesn't want to get ripped off in the process. What people said a little ways up is true, you could easily unload every last piece at a price reasonable to market price of BTC as well as ROI expectations. Selling these at an absurd premium means you'll have less chance of selling them later and can only rely on what mining profit they will provide.
People are angry because at every turn there are opportunities for people to sell hardware for a fair price, however everyone in the BTC hardware sales side of things seems to value their own greed over anything else. And there is a sucker born every minute, so people will buy with no chance of making their money back. May as well ask people to send me $100 and I'll send you back $80 once the funds clear, that's about the offer here, except you get hardware alongside it.
That's not the offer here.
My guess is that at
BTC2.1 each they are just breaking even on their costs.
It's sort of like the pharmaceutical industry, when you develop a new medication, the first pill costs 1 billion dollars and the second one is 8 cents.
Same here. They had to buy chips at a very expensive price, they did a short run of boards, which means they were probably 10 bucks each and then they had to be assembled. Circuit design, components, etc it all adds up.
Clearly you can't charge
BTC90 for the first one and
BTC0.75 for the next one, the cost has to be spread across all of them.
These folks are not flush in cash to where they can have long term vision and plan to build thousands of them and spread the cost across future sales, they have to spread it across what they have in hand. There are no lost leaders, you have to at least break even.
There is no long term vision in Bitcoins, and that is because Bitcoins change daily.