We're sitting on over 775BTC precisely 776.5493 in reserves right now. This is enough to obtain nearly 14Th/s in pre-ordered gear from cointerra for December delivery or 4.8Th/s from bitfury for October delivery at current exchange rates(bitstamp). The problem is the same as it's been since spring/summer of 2012, and that is that locking in our funds for unproven vaporware with lead times measured in months(or years) is unwise. It's even worse than it appears because we'd also be locking in an exchange rate. An exchange rate which btw is rapidly climbing in our favor. We also cannot run out and load up on currently available hardware that's soon to be obsolete because we may or may not ever see a return on that investment.
Buying ASICs retail is a suckers bet at this point, absolutely. Take half your reserves and buy LABCOIN shares.
And anyway, typically if a company doesn't know what to do with money it should return it to investors as a dividend.
Odd that so many used to fret about centralization of the global hashrate. "OMG BTCGuild is at 190Th/s; OMG AM has 30% of the entire network they MUST be stopped!" Yet now so many seem fine with just a few companies running off all the chips they can and pushing every small and medium sized operation off the blockchain. Retail purchases have been a suckers bet because of fraud perpetrated by vendors. What makes so many believe that the upcoming crop of vendors with mining operations are so much more trustworthy?
Labcoin is a high risk investment. It would be irresponsible of me to risk a significant portion of our resources on such a venture. Beginning deployment of 130nm technology in September of 2013(hopefully) with 65nm in wide use and silly efficient 55nm technology shipping now won't give LC any margin for error. They'll need to get their chips hashing quickly and almost immediately begin replacing them with their 65nm chips when developed. The rewards for investors could be significant, that's why I took a stake, but I think many tend to ignore the associated risks.