My statement wasn't a value judgement on the choice to pay more per Ghps than a device is likely to earn, just that this seemed to be happening - and not just with Blade customers either. I'm certainly not saying that the decision to buy was stupid, just that the choice was apparently not motivated by profit.
Either that, or they have different assumptions about the likely future income of such a device than you or I or others do.
Although I agree with other sentiments -
if a device is deemed to be worth more to asicminer as a miner rather than as a sale unit, then we should mine with it. However that assumes we have the ability to deploy all our units - and given that that's not the case, as I understand it, selling them seems wise from a shareholder's perspective.
If ASICMiner only adds 100Ghps to the network over say the next 100 days and the network hashrate remains the same forever after, a Blade would take ~550 days to pay for itself, assuming constant uptime. So the Blade is worth far more as a sale unit than a mining unit, if people are willing to spend more than the device is likely to earn over a lifetime.
Not sure how you got that. Using those numbers I get that a Blade pays for itself in 148 days. Obviously unrealistic since everyone knows that more TH is going to come online everywhere.
The problem also comes down to scale. If AM could sell all of its chips at 71 BTC/blade, every single blade, that would be pretty cool. But you're not going to be able to find a buyer that will drop 450,000 BTC to buy AM hardware. Or even 1000 buyers at 450 BTC each- Not a lot of them will pay 71 BTC/blade. We could, however, be able to mine with as much as we want.
I think we should sell a moderate percentage of the units as long as buying prices remain higher than some value that Friedcat & co(or perhaps the board) will need to calculate that represents what we can get from the blade ourselves, minus the opportunity cost of not having the cash on hand immediately. There is definitely a formula that can be worked out to maximize profit here.