"Profits" did not make AM start selling asics? Let me ask you why, when you have a steady income of 20% of the hashrate, would you randomly decide to start selling your machines ultimately making your piece of the pie less? You wouldn't.
no, AM was selling the first hardware for like 70 btc a blade. The profit margins were HUGE! way over what they could make mining with those products.
What you don't get is that they couldn't expand the mining operation at that time. The network was not growing fast enough. They already had 30%.
Acting like BFL caused AM to start selling hardware is laughable, especially when you look at how many units BFL actually shipped during that time.
AM only began to sell right before BFL began rolling out their massive amounts of TH. Why? because FC knew that with current gen hardware nobody would buy for such a high price after BFL begins shipping/raising the difficulty. The massive profits came from a "gold rush" of people thinking they would make money from those usb asics which we now know will never reach ROI.
BFL didn't start rolling out anything respectable until August/September. They shipped a handful of units in June, a few in July and AM had already been selling lots of hardware by then. They were no threat to the network, and AM was having no problem keeping up with the network growth during that time.
I know that they don't currently have the hardware to maintain 20% but that doesn't change the fact that mining is more profitable in the long run than hardware sales. Current 144nm will likely never reach ROI even at your overly optimistic guess of $2/gh so yes with current gen, AM or anyone will never make a profit from this current gen so why do you think there is a huge group of people that for some reason want to buy asicminers useless hardware? There is no such group and what will happen is the development of next gen hardware. And when this superior hardware is produced, why would FC rush out to sell the devices instead of holding his grip on 20% of the network which brings in 500k USD worth of bitcoins per day. I honestly doubt that FC or any asic company will be able to maintain 500k USD worth of asic sales profits.
you are having a problem understanding something. AM is selling it's hardware at more than it can mine. Do you understand what that means? That means they can get more money from that piece of hardware than they can mine from it. This is nothing new, it has always sold at these levels, and AM sold out of hardware, so yes, people are still interested in their hardware.
New gen will not change the fact that it is more profitable to sell it than mine with it. You get the entire ROI up front (or in AM's case, more than ROI)
I will put it extremely simple for you. The gold rush is
. No longer will AM be able to make shitloads from selling shovels because there is already a massive surplus of shovels. Now it will come down to the most efficient large scale mining operations.
, a massive influx of people thinking they would be getting rich by buying hardware that they thought would reach ROI in 15 days. This scenario will never happen again.