Quote from: mrb on April 10, 2013, 05:26:31 AM

Quote from: yvv on April 06, 2013, 10:42:42 PM

Suppose, you have equipment to produce ASICs. Why would you want to sell those ASICs to anybody instead of mining bitcoins and other coins yourself?

Because this:

Quote from: mrb on April 02, 2013, 07:41:48 AM

You don't understand the whole context of the Avalon project. It is very simple:

Avalon was started by 2 young engineers who had almost no money (*), and no or little experience designing ASICs. They had no choice but to sell pre-orders at a low price (due to the overall risk and uncertainty of the project) to acquire the initial capital required to develop a 110nm chip and the machines ($200-300k or so). Once they successfully manufactured the first batch of Avalons, they honored the pre-orders because they are ethical persons. If they had say at this point "f*ck you, customers, we will mine with your hardware and not ship it to you", this would have enraged the community, destroyed their reputation (so no batch #2 and no batch #3 sales revenues for them), and it would have possibly disrupted confidence in Bitcoin due to 2 guys controlling the majority of the hashing power, possibly destroying the exchange rate and their potential mining profits.

That's why. If you knew the 2 guys, you would see they care deeply about the future of Bitcoin and about ethics.

(*) ngzhang did not make that much profits from previous FPGA sales, and yifu did not bring capital AFAICS.

Also, selling hardware guarantees that:
- you make an instant profit the day the sale is made
- you "lock" such profits in USD
- scaling up is easy: no mining farm to maintain, just shipping parcels to customers

Whereas mining is inherently more risky:
- what if an ASIC miner competitor causes the difficulty to quickly increase before you deploy your own mining capacity
- what if the bitcoin exchange rate crashes
- maintaining a mining farm introduces additional complexities (case in point: ASICMINER supposedly manufactured 12 Thash/s, but they have been unable to deploy more than 6-7 Th/s for 1.5 months)
- etc

All in all, it is a risk/reward tradeoff. Yes mining can be more profitable, but it is a lot riskier.

Also, selling hardware guarantees that:
- you make an instant profit the day the sale is made
Get Hardware cost in about 1 day --- then all profit

- you "lock" such profits in USD

go to mtgox and convert BTC to $ or any other money

- scaling up is easy: no mining farm to maintain, just shipping parcels to customers

who want to ship product to customer ? they complain -- lose orders -- want support-- return product to be fixed - put shit comments on forums---
- easier to put rig in warehouse and turn on