Next Gen Miner Group Buy (with a difference)

I am looking to see if there is any interest in the following proposal.

I propose to run a group buy for the next generation of miners that I expect we will start to see being advertised for sale in early (Q1) 2014. At that time all of the current batch of miners on pre-order (KnC, Hash Fast, VMC etc) should have been delivered. Difficulty will be somewhere around the moon at that stage and next gen products will start making an appearance for pre-orders.

My intention is to buy up the earliest machines and hopefully be first (or so close that it doesn't matter) in line for delivery. The aim would be to run the miner for 7-10 days, during which time the machine would be offered for auction on ebay and also on the bitcointalk.org Auctions forum.

The price of miners once they are in hand goes up significantly. The value of the earliest miners is obviously higher than those later in the queue.

Why do this? One of the greatest risks of buying one of these units is that they will mine less than you pay for them if difficulty increases too quickly, therefore your RPI is not guaranteed by any means. Neither is it with this proposal but it opens up a new avenue of potential profit. If the unit does not sell for more than the purchase price it can be left running and mining so there will be income generated from that. Most group buys intend a sale of the hardware after 2 years, this juts brings that part of the deal forward by approx 102-103 weeks.

Again there are no guarantees of anything. The risk we take is in buying a pre-order. As with BFL the product may be so badly delayed that it is never profitable and even a resale will not make us a profit. However the upside is that we could sell for between 2 and 3 times the purchase price if we are lucky and get early units.

Why do I think this will work?

I have been buying and reselling the ASICMINER Block Erupter on Amazon, Ebay and Gumtree since they were 2BTC each. Initially I sold the first 10 for £250 each, the next 12 at £170-£150, the next 20 at approx £90 and I have 44 more arriving today (0.1btc units) and I have buyers lined up at £40 each. I have made quite a bit of profit doing this however competition is fierce and after ebay fees it is not really worth selling via there now.

I have reinvested my profits into 2 pre-orders. The VMC FAST HASH ONE (256 giga hash), I have order number 17. This spec unit is now for sale from VMC for $5699, I paid $3999 for my unit and they have confirmed they will honour that price. I also purchased a Baby Jet (400 giga has) from Hash Fast, this unit was toward the end of the original 550 released for sale but is protected by the miner protection programme.

For both investments I would hope to get a good return after running the machines for a week or 10 days while the auctions run their course. The reason behind running it is to a) Test the machine, I will but don't want to have to act as a go between, between the eventual owner and the company over technical issues.
B) I will be selling a second hand machine, something I owned and used. Therefore there is a lower tax liability (zero) on any profits made from the resale as opposed to selling it as a new item.

I am looking for expressions of interest at this stage and then I will look at organising an escrow with John K if that is how people want to do it. Alternatively I will hold the BTC and John K can hold on to my personal info/ASICMINER direct shares or similar collateral. I would personally prefer to hold the btc so that there is no delay in placing an order for the units as soon as they are released. As opposed to waiting for John K to be online.

Another bonus is that by having a group of investors then we can all keep an eye out for products being listed for sale. So if something is listed for sale at 9am PST someon can message me so that purchase does not get delayed waiting for me to find the bitcointalk.org or reddit post linking to the sale.

Any questions let me know.