BFL ASICs ROI gets shaky with a $60 bitcoin at 1,500,000,000 difficulty ... but I guess there's Europeans with 50c per kilowatt/hour power bills.
To any actual buyers, seriously, I mean SERIOUSLY complaining about AM's first round hardware pricing, I'd say it was probably a cheap lesson in impulse control, vs ending up on a murder charge or something. If you were oblivious at the time, some 90% of the bitcoin world were standing back, pointing, and laughing at you.
It isn't the high price of their hardware I'm worried about. It is what they are doing with their reinvestment that is really scary combined with an issuance of "shares".
Paladin has it exactly correct. Just take a deep breath and think about this for a moment guys. Manufacturing, products that aren't turned on... if a China decided to kill bitcoin all that ASICMINER hardware is right there waiting to be seized and used against us.
The only ethical thing for friedcat to do is sell off all the existing asicminer hardware so it's at least distributed... and sell out each batch completely before making more of it. I imagine that shareholders would be annoyed but would gladly take their share of the profits.
I didn't want to go down the conspiracy path but yes, that's sorta why I mentioned Bernanke. He's just some dude. Hell, he could be working for the Chinese government for all we know. Their state run media has been airing bitcoin news a lot lately.