Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
So if I'm a company that's going to sell hardware that can be used to make money mining bitcoins, why am I selling them? Shouldn't I just make them and use them?
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I'm sure that factors into the equation but you will also need the power infrastructure and HVAC to run it all. Low power/low heat ASICs will certainly have much lower demands but Bitcoins are always unstable and there have been bubbles in the past.
As long as you can profit from selling your ASICs to both profit & recoup your R&D costs for a present value sum of money versus banking on having a huge stockpile of single-purpose hardware that becomes instant junk if the market falls out in the future, I'd sell as much hardware as I could while mining at the same time.
Mining took off in many respects because it used consumer level hardware that was both obtainable and held it's own value because it served a separate purpose if Bitcoin turned out to be a fad. You can't use or sell custom ASICs as graphics cards.