In the delays for step 2 & 3, have them sitting around plugged in mining, paying for their use. The final sale defrays the cost of building the thing, and you effectively get free Bitcoins--right before the market for mining tanks due to your dispersal of mining ASICs.
Is this reasonable?
It may be that the competition has driven manufacturers to attempt to sell so they can offload their stock. But Avalon claims that they are made-to-order.
If it were me, I would've built 1000 of these, made them pay for themselves and then some, then started dumping as soon as it looked like a competitor was about to launch. And again, this sale is too early for that to make sense.
Then, eventually, these things will be worth very little but the money will be made.
I would imagine this will drive BTC prices pretty far downward. A few guys with a couple hundreds BTC mining ASICs can monopolize the vast majority of BTC being mined. And given the current price, they might want out soon.
1. Benevolent users want to avoid the "51%" attack. It could undermine confidence and perhaps cause users to flee.
2. It's possible that we'll see a hashing power arms race where several cycles of ASIC production supersede or render the previous generation unprofitable. While it may be possible to go it alone and win, it's still a risky prospect, for the above reason, and for the risk associated with ASIC development. Therefore, ASIC developers have an incentive to distribute the machines into the hands of BTC users at large, and quickly.
These ASIC miners are going to have a limited profitability lifetime. While it may be years before they are uneconomical in terms of the cost of the electrical power to run them, they could be rendered barely profitable by a faster generation of ASIC based machines, or by an unfavorable turn in Bitcoin exchange rates; which could happen on a time scale of months or even weeks.
I guess if they get a good deal for energy (or need to heat the factory) "soak testing" is a good way to get a bit of money back.
Bitcoin price is not tied to computational effort spent on mining. The creation rate of new Bitcoins is already constrained and well defined. Producing more machines would just mean Avalon would get a larger portion of the new Bitcoins.
If they're that good and the manufacturers put a load online themselves, then the folks buying one are not buying as big a slice of the pie as they thought they could?
This is a very unhealthy thing for the BTC market in general as only a few players will have the ASICs to mine profitably, and everyone else will be spending far too much per kW to do any mining at all.
One of the weaknesses of BTC, as far as I understand, is that anyone with a majority of the global hashing power can rewrite new transactions on the blockchain. If regular GPU miners give up and a few players spin up some massive ASICs, we may very well see this become a reality.