Black Arrow would certainly have announced their tape-out as soon as they hit that milestone. Its simply not sensible in this marketplace there is any benefit to taping out secretly and not telling anyone... especially because they're trying to take pre-orders as we speak, and they'd get a hell of a lot more pre-orders if people had confidence the chip was coming.. so clearly, by definition, they haven't taped out yet, or they would've said. And look at Cointerra for an example of the pre-tape out and post-tape out frenzy... ok, so bitcoin going up helped a lot... but their sales & support staff are snowed under with the volume of inquiries.. and that may have had a lot to do with announcing tape-out as it significantly reduces the risk profile of the product and its shipping on time.
No. This is a poor argument, by all accounts. And an argument that revolves entirely around Cointerra's story.
Until Cointerra were drawn into the "have they or haven't they" question surrounding the mask tape-outs, it was never an issue, and never a marketing strategy. For any ASIC company, of which there have been 4 that came before them.
There is no evidence of Cointerra's tape-out, and even if it were the truth, it is by no means their only challenge whilst trying to complete this project. All sorts of other problems can cause delays, and there is no real way to know which of these problems are real and which are concealing embarrassing oversight of something simple. BFL played that exact same game with their customers; anytime a delay was announced it was attributed to somehting highly technical, and never to something as prosaic as bad contingency planning in their material requirements.
With these ASIC developers, it's always: "We're so ahead of our time, so bleeding edge, that the challenges of technology innovation are unfolding in totally unexpected ways! Even Stephen Hawking and Einstein couldn't have seen this one coming!"
Whereas the reality is we have no proof of these things, all we really know is they goofed something up, and are using excuses that very few people are qualified to comment on, and no-one independent can actually verify.