Re: I thought about this and I wonder why Asic builders don't stop building?
If you can sell a $100 miner to the public for $500 why not? Then you can take the $500 in revenue and buy 5 of your own in-house miners and the net result would be 6 units added to the network at the cost of 1 to the miner company. The miner company would get 500% the hash/$ as you do and have minimal downside with increasing difficulty.
If they didn't have plans to do so now they do
If they didn't have plans to do so now they do
Lol, that's the business model they used to fund their companies. Now they don't have to deal with all of the hassles of retail sales.
I'm guessing that they just prefer not do deal with the public for the marginal profit from selling 1000 miners when they can just build them by the container-load for themselves and other large operations.
Sure, it goes against everything bitcoin was founded on. But there's nothing we can do to stop this freight train now. It's just going to run us over before it crashes at the end of the line all while slowly destroying bitcoin in the process.
Agreed 100%. BFL is sitting on much "free" money from the first ASIC generation, it doesn't matter how bad they make the second gen, they still win with this business model.
And to think that Yifu decided to design the Avalon because he was worried that BFL represented a threat to the future of Bitcoin by monopolizing production of mining equipment.
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/3203/avalon-ships-bitcoins-first-consumer-asics/