so they've run with the money? not good.
And our profits,..
Scenario A.Lets just use the a small scale example using x-3's for this little adventure... (obviously the numbers are bigger, but the shoe still fits).
Lets say it takes $3-5M to get through the design and initial products phase (as it's outsourced, lets just call it a direct cost)
You sell miners at 5K each,.. You only need to sell 400-600 x3's to cover your expenses. (easy enough based on making insanely inaccurate promises)
You plan to have them done and ready to ship by the first of the year but then think,.. "If we keep these in house mining we'll make about 10K each off of them, so lets get them done, and then keep them in house till feb." (double all these numbers and it still works out logically)
You create your miners, (maybe they even show up a little early) and have them up and mining, and delivery time comes and someone says "Yknow, mining companies have issues all the time. I mean sure this is pretty much proven technology now, it's like saying we're making a PC that "somehow" isn't going to work right, but people will believe that because all the guys before had problems, let's just kick it out a month or so and say we had manufacturing issues. They all must be kinda stupid for pre-ordering stuff like this anyway, so it's not like they'll catch on or do anything about it. There's a TON of reasons we can invent for things not shipping "till next week."
Another 5K(ish) per unit rolls in (because now difficulty is going up).
The initial "sell" of 400 units has now minted $6M if every initial sale was at 100% cost mitigating.
BA thinks,... "Shit we still haven't shipped and all they do is piss and moan and take it out on the poor sap resellers we suckered in. We really aren't at any risk at all and we just get to keep printing money, why stop?"
"Let's just keep it going till the very last second (when we actually get some calls from legal reps, and after these things are costing us more in electricity to run than they make) we'll ship them out and say "Oh golly sorry it took so long but BTC could go up to 10K each, and then you'll ROI, and we DID deliver them so.... so sorry, no refund you have a fully functioning miner now, please buy our other products, we'll do better next time, promise, here's a coupon.""
Or now that they've sucked all the life out of the miners, they actually WILL do a 100% buy one get one match and STILL make a mega killing of our hardware.
And they'll fuck you on delivery of the PS's because it only costs $20 to deliver those, and They probably only cost $15 to begin with so...MOAR PROFFIT!(volume discount + aggregator which is what most Chinese tech companies do)
And they'll prefer doing that over giving you hosting as comp because they have to pay the electricity to run those now ROIless units.
Oh and lets give them some coupons for our other vaporware shit, not 100% off coupons (hell no) but something like "%25 with payment up front so we can ride this pony all over again. Maybe this time we really will just keep them in house for a few months then ship. We really should go legit as we're all rolling in cash now."
And that alone 100% justifies everything we've all been through because they sell a product that will go obsolete and they know it, BTC products at this scale are no more. It's a business that can't last and non SHA-256 coins will be the future, so why not risk it all to get it all.
Everything above is based on "guesstimating" really shitty sales numbers. Based on order numbers I'm guessing they have at least 1K X3 orders minimum, plus all the X1's and hosting. (roughly $15M profit worst case minimum in this scenario)
I could walk into a lawyers office tomorrow, lay this scenario out, in this market, hand him $2M and be 100% assured that I would never lose another dime on this venture if I didn't want to and he'd be correct. Fledgeling market, international buyers, China, pre-orders, precedent of other companies etc.. etc.. ZERO chance of winning a lawsuit with a multimilliondollar firm VS "the best we all could come up with"
Or,... As some people would still try to believe this happened:
Scenario B.Technology company who has already gone through large scale IT/Tech products gets into market.
Apparently they look at investing millions without doing a lot of research across the board (they don't pre-engage their manufacturers, they don't use existing manufacturers or engage companies who have any kind of time turn vs pricing guarantees.
Prototypes weren't ordered for testing and when they were the production models were miraculously completely different and caused craziness.
Communication that could have saved time/effort/woe was negated from inception to this day.
Ties to major scam/confidence companies exist but have NOTHING to do with any of this.
Products are pre-sold before they do any of the *real* design or research outside of CAD drawings despite having specs available day 1.
Then at EVERY SINGLE potential point of failure between design and delivery, something amazingly goes wrong at the last possible second injecting a new delay, despite them having and giving assurances to the contrary at every stage.
And somehow simple basic design things were completely left out of the process until "the week before shipping was supposed to happen"
Occam's razor.
It's way more likely that these guys took "Massive Profits" with almost zero risk, as opposed to doing honest business and seeing a tiny fraction of the same money. Hell, truth be told, if most of us were honest, we'd do the EXACT same thing if we knew we'd get away with it, be anonymous, and make millions of dollars. I'm honest enough to say I would.
. 
