Just curious... What if this type of language was put in the next auctions?

I believe selling or mining isnt the question. Mining has to be more profitable all the time because any sane miner only will buy the miner when he see the chance to meet ROI in a certain amount of time. Otherwise mining is only something for fans of a product or contributors to bitcoin but not for investors. So even if one could guess the difficulty so good it wouldnt help much because if selling would be more profitable you need buyers that lose money. And there arent endless that doesnt matter if they will break even. Of course when one is after the fast money its another thing.
I believe here is a good guess: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178051.0

I think I might not have been clear in part - the exchange rate affects what people are willing to pay (in fiat) for the rig. We know this to be true watching BFL orders, which (presumably, based on order numbers) spiked considerably when the value of BTC went over $200. That's because they were buying based on current promised hashrate vs. expected difficulty vs. (then) current exchange rate. But you're correct in that it shouldn't matter at all when looking purely at BTC values... it's just that it's demonstrably NOT restricted to miners paying with BTC. Everything else I think we can agree on... just different pages from the same book

Well, my point is that there's sure to be a perfect ratio that would generate maximum profit at any given point in time, and I'm pretty sure that, until all other ASIC manufacturers get up to speed, mining in the short term at much higher than 10% of global hashrate is better since difficulty is lower now than it will be in the future, and we seem to have a definitive leg up on the other manufacturers... but I have no idea what the optimal ratio actually is today, let alone in the future. It is, after all, a moving target... you're absolutely right that it depends entirely on total global hashrate (i.e. difficulty) and cost for devices per TH/s in the open market versus the going exchange rate for fiat. If BTC goes either up or down in value versus fiat, that will affect the optimal ratio of mining to selling by AM, as the prices people are willing to pay for devices, even in BTC, is affected by how valuable the BTC being generated are against their preferred fiat. If exchange rates are flat and hardware is not due for a generational update (as in changing the die size to a smaller process width), then it makes more sense to sell shovels. But, if we have a leg up in technology, it makes sense to keep that new technology (the "new shovels", so to speak) to ourselves until someone else comes out with a good competing product, while unloading the old shovels to the market. Only when there's a balance of power should we primarily focus on selling shovels, since the effect of our own addition to the hashrate would be balanced by the other manufacturers. Whenever we have the advantage, we displace our own in-house shovels with the new ones until it makes more sense to sell them, since our addition would have a greater effect on the difficulty levels and we would be the only ones able to take advantage. You are also very much correct when it comes to physical capacity, since we can't mine if there's no juice/space/cooling to run the machines. But I see that as an exception to the formula given the amount of space contracted recently.

I think this is mostly a time-to-market problem, really. The faster we can get the new shovels to market compared to the other ASIC manufacturers, the more we should hold back sales to be able to use them ourselves and to encourage the highest prices possible for the new shovels that we *do* sell. And, to circle around to my original point, if we commit to a certain percentage of the global hashrate, we have an advantage against the other manufacturers (on the basis of hardware sales) on two fronts: establishing market trust in the ability to deliver quality goods (we mine with our own shovels, after all) and stability in supply because everyone knows we're not only transparent about how many we're keeping for ourselves, but we're also depending on our development of new technology for our own mining efforts, meaning that we are going to push the envelope for our own good (which translates to the good of the buyers as well.) This is in the same general spirit as the Ferrari model, where if global demand for a car is 10,000 per year, they make 9,999 of them and command top dollar.

Why 25%? Why not 45% (To remain under 50% and the variance of networkhashrate around this). I think Asicminer now is in the best position of all producers. They can buy for low money many chips. Seeable from the lower dividends. Not much lost. They seems to have created a workflow that will lead to fast deployment. That means they can create new hashpower very fast. Probably faster than any other. Even Avalon with the selling of their Asicchips and the DIY-Miner wont be able to outbid this fast i believe.

So then, when reaching the 45% border, Asicminer could start to sell Miners. Maybe buy 1000TH, remain 750TH to hold the 45% and sell the rest in form of miners. Maybe more to take the customers from the other companies away (Mean, i know...) This way its possible to get the earnings of some months mining in a moment so that the real earnings are going above 50% without waking fear of the people about a >50% attack.

At the moment i dont see a company or concept that could beat Asicminer. At least from the infos available.
...
If only... the datacenter would be ready with proper power and network so that Asicminer could play out its power...

Well then show me friedcat's posts predating March 12 mentioning plans to expand beyond 50 Thash/s (or beyond 12+50 Thash/s) or plans to sell hw -> There are none.

If our chips are successfully produced, all the following businesses will
contribute to the shareholders' return:
  Self-Mining with First Batch of Chips At least 12TH/s in
total, that is equivalent to 30MH/s per share, or 300MH/s per BTC.
  Hashrate/Chip/Board Selling Net profits are
conservatively calculated as $5 per GH/s. That roughly equals to 0.5BTC per
GH/s with the current BTC/USD exchange rate. It means that each time we sell
1TH/s of hashing power in various forms, the net profit per share will be
1.25mBTC, that is, 1.25% of the initial investment.
  Self-Mining after Mass Production Unlimited hashrate in
theory because of the low margin cost. But in reality we have to consider the
cost of management (labor) and place (rent). We believe an expansion to 50TH/s
is not hard to achieve. That pushes the hashrate per share to 155MH/s, or
1.55G/s per BTC.
  Next-Generation Products The plan will be discussed among
board members and approved by shareholders, because it would require keeping
some of the revenues instead of paying them all as dividends. The return of
this stage is difficult to estimate, since in the Bitcoin world everything may
happen and happens even quicklier than imagination. But we personally believe
that much more potential profits wait there.

China.

Making a series of unrealistic assumptions here, but let's go:

They have 200TH+50TH+12TH coming in the near future. Put it all in 10 GH/s blades, and they have 26200 devices to sell. At 26 BTC a piece (current highest bid), that is 681200 BTC in total - or 1.703 BTC per share.

If they all sell at 25, BTC250 spread across 400k shareholders is mBTC0.625 per share.

Last dividend was 0.00695566 (if you include the 1 satoshi per share), or mBTC6.95566

So, no idea what the profit margin on these things is - let's say it's 75% at this price (don't forget, shipping is included).

Which means the proceeds of this sale will produce a once-off 15% bump in dividends.

So the question now is - how many of these things do we have to sell, once the auction is over (and presumably the auction price will become the "normal" price).

Lol,Lol, you beat me to it. Absurdly low.

First auction is up. Tell your friends.

 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=178275.0

You think 200TH will be sold? I dont know if thats the case but i think that would be a huge mistake. Firstly it would bring so much TH into the net that asicminer mining revenue would drop dramatically. But the worst thing would be that selling 200TH would need very much money spent from the community. Think about it this way: A Avalon asic with 65GH only sold for $25000 on ebay. That means you would need to sell 3076 units with 65GH. For a total price of $76,923,077 or 1,025,641BTC (when 1BTC=$75). And i believe it wont be possible to sell so many units or Mining Power for a real good price.

So i think Asicminer wont sell so much. I might be wrong but i see a problem there. Leading to units selling way under the price they should get when less units were sold.

I would like to know how long it will take until Asicminer can resume deployment though. It cant be too long i hope. If that happens it wouldnt be necessary to sell very much TH anymore.

The products are going to most likely be shipped from Hongkong. And what we accept is ordering instead of pre-ordering, which means that when we decide to sell, we ship it. Hopefully this makes our products be valued higher by the market.

I think exactly the same. The rumours spread that now its not only half the dividend but maybe even a fourth only because of kept investment money is probably the reason for this. Plus the long lasting 6TH/s isnt advantageous. So i expected a drop. But im astonished how low it fell. I think that will go up soon again. At least in 8 days, when the next real dividend is paid.

It is actully very simple.
The unsold IPO shares are considered void until needed for fundraising.

Until then: sold IPO shares are treated as if they represent 200.000 shares.
If bitcoin does 8 decimals so can Asicminer-shares.

Therefore if 163,962 have been sold they are now valued at
1,21979483 times the dividend of a Bitfountain share.

That doesn't answer what is happening to those unsold 40k shares. Do they even exist? How is dividend calculated?

I really don;t think they have a working ASIC yet... especially considering their actions up till now