Pricing isn't based manufacturing costs, it's based on how much people are willing to pay. Charging the maximum the market will bear isn't greed, it's just smart business. They'd be idiots to give their product away for less than they could get out of it.
What is idiotic is comments like this. You don't know how much the network hashrate grows in the coming months, and pricing your product so high the miners won't even ROI if the growth is just slightly higher than pessimistic estimates is just plain greedy - offloading the risk to miners. Besides, if every manufacturer followed your advice of not selling to "the public", you'd just get centralization of the network hashpower - the exact opposite that Bitcoin is supposed to achieve.
Actually he is true. From a business point of view it's better to sell at what people are willing to pay than at manufacturing costs+small profit, but you need to find the sweet spot.
Exactly. They're running a business, not a charity. I mean I can understand people's frustrations, but at the end of the day their job is to make money, not guarantee us a certain ROI or make us money.
And we all know how crazy things have been with Bitcoin and ASICs. Their margins may be healthy with current pricing, but then maybe in 2-3 months they'll have to sell the boards at razor thin margins or even take a loss on them just to get rid of the remaining inventory. How much time and money did they lose on those Avalon boards that became worthless before they even shipped, for example? Very soon the amount of Bitcoins generated by these BitFury boards and price people are willing to pay for them may be exceeded by how much it cost them to purchase the chips/other components and manufacture/distribute the boards. This may all be stuff they're taking into account when you see that 699 price. You have to appreciate that they are taking a risk here as well, it's certainly not only the miners who are putting their $$$ at stake.
It sucks if you canceled another order and waited for these boards based on the projection that they would be cheaper, but unless you were *guaranteed* that these boards would cost 470, not sure what recourse you'd really have. This is the exact reason I don't invest anything in Bitcoin/preorders/ASICs that I'm not willing to lose.