This is what you have with ASIC.
You either mine yourself, or you sell the hardware at more than you will get by mining. Doing otherwise has no sense from a business perspective.
Fallacy.
Just because you can run a profitable venture with 60 gold mining pick axes does not mean you "automatically will" as a company. You might wish to sell it to others who will put it to that end use.
A real world example is ASICMiner. When their blades were profitable they seemingly couldn't house all of the blades they produced at their farm. They sold units and/or ran them until they could grow and expand their mining farm. They turned to selling them to fund their operations.
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Either way, the Logic (if you want to call it that) that BlackArrow uses is broken in such an obvious way...it's not even funny.
You can't sell mining equipment above what it actually produces in a reasonable period of time. It would entirely defeat the purpose of mining.
Is there something in the drinking water these days or is it me?The only way for customers to be offered competitively priced units that allow ROI is to be "investors" when the manufacturer hasnt got the funds and needs to gather money through preorders. If the vendor has the money to develop the units by himself, he would either mine or sell them for more than those machine will mine. It's pure logic.
A argument that does not apply.
BlackArrow is not developing anything. They are simply cloning hardware where all the work has been done. Their expended effort is minimal compared to what the Avalon Team had to put into it. They literally have it put in front of them on a silver platter.
Guys, ASIC mining is a very special beast by itself. The company that offers to their customers immediately available money printing machines that guarantee ROI does not exist, and will never exist.
That is some very concerning bullshit you are posting there.
I made plenty profit. Again, is there something in the drinking water that I should know about?
Do you people even think before you type? Sorry, but seriously.
Your arguments are usually right on the spot, but this is not the case.
ASIC miner hardware is hugely overpriced and doesn't allow any kind of ROI, so you are actually confirming what I'm saying with your example.
This is why I mentioned in my post it was "Past Tense".
You probably have made plenty of profit with an Avalon batch 1, as you were an investor: Avalon needed your money to develop and manufacture its units, there were no guarantees no prototypes whatsoever, the delivery was expected +3 months after payment, and for all these reasons batch 1 customers/investors were offered such a good deal.
This is true. But there are/were contradictory statements from Team Avalon. (depending on how you read into it)
On the one hand, they said:
--If they failed to produce, then they would refund everyone.
Though how do you do that if you don't dip into pre-order funds? How do you refund someone if you consume the cash? (Business insurance of some type?)
--At Bitcoin 2013 Yifu (from Team Avalon) made mention that they used crowd sourcing. Though he wasn't specific on what he meant by that. (infer as needed)
Again, you are confirming my point with your example. Nobody is going to sell you immediately available money minting machines for less money they will likely mint, unless you have a rare case where a company's production capabilities are vastly superior to their deployment capabilities. Even in that case, as per ASIC miner, they will try to price the units so selling them will be at least as profitable as mining with them (as ASIC miner did), making ROI unlikely for the customer.
A properly funded company doesn't need "crowd sourcing". Usually they will go to 1 or more investor(s), pitch the idea, and if the the VC thinks it is viable they take most of the risk to get a product to market.
When the product is fully developed, then they put it on sale. (of course most bitcoin companies are shady at best...keep that in mind!)
So the exception (the bitcoin community) is not actually the rule.
The current crop of companies are all (one might say BFL isn't but I am extremely skeptical) based on crowd sourcing. So they push the risk unto their buyers.
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To get to the heart of your argument, I think a company can sell shovels to miners without charging the weight of the shovel in gold.
Or
They can charge the shovels weight in gold and thereby burn all the potential customers that are stupid enough to buy the shovels at that price. (bad business model!)
That's what we are going to get with ASIC, we better get used to it.
We don't have to get used to it. We can change it.
If you point it out to the dummies of the world that they don't have to be financially raped at the online counter, then people will wise up. Companies like BlackArrow who want to sell a Shovel Clone® will be annoyed by people like me warning people about the financial rape.
People like BlackArrow will either stop the financial rape at the counter, or close their doors down. So far, it looks like they chose to close their doors. In another thread, a member by the name of Yantis wanted to sell 3 or 4 of his 17 or 18 Avalons.
Now everyone knew the price was absurd (250 BTC per Avalon), but did they know by how much? Well a graphic or two later and all illusions were wiped clean. The seller wasn't comfortable in selling his Avalons for far less, so he seemingly called it quits. He himself did not honestly seem to know how much or how little his own Avalon were projected to make in the near future.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=234614.0He asked for the template so he could evaluate his own circumstance.
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ASICs can be sold at
sane prices. There is nothing stopping it from happening. It is entirely beneficial for Mining hardware companies to sell their hardware at profitable (to the buyer) rates.
Doubly so, if they are merely a straightforward clone maker.
Once a specific mining platform is no longer profitable to produce or sell (by either buyer or seller) there needs to be a model to replace it. Not keep selling it at a price point that benefits the seller and dooms the buyer.
We don't mine BitCoins so we can pass our wealth on to the clone manufacturer.
