So the question is, if you had 100 5 gh/s units ready to sell for $247.00 each right now, and selling them would get you a huge chunk of the market share coming up, why would you be mining with them to generate ~$2,700 a day in Bitcoin?
500 GH/s will get your roughly 0.6% of the bitcoin network. The Bitcoin network is dominated by Avalon and ASICMiner. Their devices together could easily account for over 50% of the hash rate now that Avalon is shipping batch 2.
Also, BFL had to include twice as many chips as planned in order to get their advertised hash rate. If they are doing small batches of chips (100 or so) on an MPW prototype run, their chips are quite expensive ($50-100) and that would eat their margins (thus explaining their price hike on Jalapenos). If they are only making $50 per device, then $2700 a day looks good. Especially if they are in a cash crunch.
Personally, I don't think BFL has enough units working to make that much.
All the more reason that the implication that BFL is sitting on their hands--or a working farm of ASIC mining hardware--is absurd. They're caught up in the middle of an arms race, and if they don't ship soon, they are going to lose big. I can assure you that they know this better than anybody else. The last thing they want or need is to delay shipping to the point that people no longer need or want their product.
They are failing to hit targets, repeatedly. Nobody denies this. Understandably, people are frustrated. But being a business owner myself, I can assure you that it's always the most frustrating/stressful for the person who is under the gun to deliver.
Again, nobody is saying that BFL is perfect, or that it's not frustrating to not receive your product. Nobody's saying that BFL and their representatives haven't made mistakes, or dropped the ball in customer-relations.
The question at hand is whether it's reasonable to assume that a customer can go about actively seeking to trash a company (regardless how justified he may feel), and not expect that company to sever business relations with him. The answer is that you can't. This isn't the moral dilemma some people are making it out to be.
So much this. Anybody currently interested in making money in the developing ASIC market would also not going to be so shortsighted to think that a little bit of money mined today means anything compared to dominating the sales of ASICs right now. People are already throwing money at BFL, if they were able to ship at volume today, the amount of money being thrown at them would be absurd:
This is one group buy for US/Canada for the USB ASICs.
895 ($110,085) worth were sold. Each one of these at 300 mh/s. At
we're looking at 1.22 mh/s per $.
BFL was able to ship their units today: 5000 mh/s for $275. This comes out to about 18.18 mh/s per $.
Nobody in their right mind would be buying from anywhere other than BFL if they could ship right now, and BFL would be out of their minds to -not- ship if they could.