as Ytterbium has so eloquently pointed out, you're not going to get any asic mining company to fund the entire NRE, tapeout, and production costs just so you can buy a profitable money generating machine. otherwise, they would just mine with it.
I know this may be OT a fair bit but I think this is to generic of a statement and I can actually see why a company would want to retail a product vs mining with it if they funded NRE and production privately.
I mean I see mining as a bullish bet on BTC. As it takes time to convert the sunk capital cost of the hardware to BTC until the BE point and then hopefully a profit (why wait for mined BTC if you don't believe price will increase). Not to mention you lose the ability use that capital for anything else until the mined coins return over time.
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The other option, of course is to sell you equipment at prices that will be
unprofitable for their customers.
For chips on hand, you simply charge a crazy rate. Like people trying to charge $19k for Avalon clones.
But there's another way to do it without
appearing to charge exorbitant rates. Let's say you make a cheap ASIC, 10gh/s chip and order 1 million of them, at a cost of $5/chip. That's 5Ph/s. At most, you could take 90% of the network, and make a couple million dollars a year. Mining.
or you could take orders at what seems like a really good rate right now: $5/Gh/s. That's $50 a chip or $2500 for a 50 chip 500Gh/s unit.
Seems crazy good, but, what people don't realize is that once all the chips ship the difficulty will go up by over 900%
just from your chips alone.
What you want to do, then, is maximize the time between when you take orders, and when you ship in order to take as many pre-orders as possible.
Then, think BFL: They keep talking about how they're the ones driving up the difficulty and that it doesn't make sense for their customers to complain, because if they ship faster the diff will just go up more quickly (while also claiming KnC and all their other future competitors will fail like they did, so no need to worry).
Butterfly labs sold units
basically knowing full well that their customers would never make ROI, simply because of the volume of orders they took.
Now, the problem of course is that not only can you rip people off if you fund the chips yourself, you can also rip people off
and crowd-fund a design. Which is what BFL did.
In any event, I think the price here is a little too high given the risk both that they'll fail, and the risk none of their competitors will.