Are you going by BTC Sold on Ebay rates as well? I sold a few .1 BTC increments on Ebay for $280 each about a week ago, so $2800 per coin. I got lucky and only one person charged back so far though.
Just giving you the heads up, self moderated or not, you are going to get a lot of hate asking Ebay prices. Ebay prices are the way they are because everyone on there is a scammer, and in order to break even, they have to sell at a 300+% markup to make up for the 66% of buyers being scammers.
Strictly hypothetical senario, say the miners were to predicted to make 11 BTC during their lifetime. If you buy the miner direct from the manufacturer for 10 BTC, or $7,000 because the price of Bitcoins at the time were $700 per coin, and then the price of BTC drops to $500 per coin, the miner isn't still worth $7,000 or 14 BTC at the new rate, its still worth around 10-11 BTC which just so happens to be about $5,000. Mining hardware is directly pegged to Bitcoins, not USD. That works the oposite way as well, if you pay 5 BTC for some hardware at $1000 per coin, and then the price of BTC goes up to $2000, the miner is still worth 5 BTC.
I know you are saying $3,000 loosely here, and I'm sure you are willing to negotiate, however for $3,000 at current rates you could just outright buy 4 Bitcoins, which is more than the miner can possibly produce in its lifetime, and then you don't have to deal with a physical object, which is why mining hardware tends to sell for its predicted income generation, minus a few percent for the trouble. Kind of like a structured settlement in Bitcoins. You can have 10.5 BTC now for the hardware in the senario, or you can wait a few months and gather it slowly for a total of 11 BTC. It doesn't make sense for someone to pay $3000 (4 BTC) for hardware that wont make 4 BTC.
No disrespect, but I'm sure you will get a lot of unconstructive critism, and wanted to provide you with actual useful information rather than just calling you names. If you want top dollar, your best bet is to play roulette on Ebay.
Salty,
You do post some good arguments and great points but what my retort would be:
1) You've actually convinced me (based on our earlier PM's) not to accept BTC for these since it just creates some headaches discussing BTC holding vs gains with hardware, ect. I'm just taking USD offers at this point so I can avoid that whole hypothetical conversation.
2) Selling a digital item (like BTC) on ebay and accepting Paypal vs selling Hardware are completely night and day differences in seller protection policies and charge back scenarios. When you sell physical hardware on eBay and accept Paypal, you are protected from charge-backs under seller protection as opposed to selling a virtual item, which gives you zero seller protection. You might say, well what if they just use the equipment to mine and return it 30 days later, well you can also put disclaimers in your auction that returns are not accepted, item is as is, Ebay lets you select your own return policy and only protects the buyer if you ship something significantly not as described. There's ways to protect yourself here too, such as photo documentation of the packaging and shipping process, ect. (yes, that part can be sticky but if you're diligent, you can protect yourself.)
3) Genesis block calculators don't work for assuming the value of hardware, I mean I've been playing around with it all day and you can plug the latest and greatest stuff there and it all comes back with shitty returns and tells you that your investment is a loss. People that buy mining equipment these days buy it on faith and believe that BTC is going to go up a ton. Otherwise, there's no mining equipment in existence worth buying at current prices. All of it comes back in the red very quickly.
4) I don't mind feedback and opinions here, I self moderated because of just flat out trolls that hit these threads (and seem to pretty much spend all of their time on this forum looking for threads to troll) so it's hard to have a market post up that doesn't get bloated with kiddie troll posts or derailed by people that have uninformed or biased opinions as a buyer.
5) People that buy mining equipment now typically have plans to run it indefinitely regardless of if power consumption is > profit vs current BTC price. People run mining equipment because they believe BTC price will go up, difficulty could not go up as fast for a lot of reasons and it could potentially be a good investment. It's a gamble, sure, but so is buying bitcoin for fiat. Buying mining equipment is simply buying bitcoin over time and paying for it with electricity and hardware costs. Different strokes for different folks.
In the end, people can decide what they'd like to pay for hardware. My argument here is that selling Bitcoins on eBay and selling hardware, are not comparable and don't offer the same protections or opportunies for scam artists. If stuff sells on eBay for X and it is in fact selling (which it is), that makes the market price for that right around that price. I don't think you can really argue that. The only argument here is the idea that people are running scams on sellers and I don't think that applies so much to physical hardware. I've contacted eBay just to make sure and I am correct based on my conversation with the rep.
In the end, it only takes difficulty increases taper off and BTC prices to go up to make buying mining equipment a much better option.