At the current BTC value selling miners is probably more profitable than mining. They are selling to someone. Just not us.
Could be a very astute observation. If any of the state actors would suddenly want to mine bitcoin, they will sweep the slate clean and there will be almost no miners for sale.
That would be hard to do with all your sales and engineering staff on holiday.
I think the writing was on the wall when (i) bitmain pulled their "collaboration" with syscooling on a watercooled S5, but then again, that coincided with a dip in BTC value to fiat, and (ii) bitmain started offering large batches of gear. Saying that, the S5 is clearly a winner for bitmain in many aspects (should be for the home miner too), but the hassle they have to go through to service the home miners' market while they also have mining interests (not to mention the large buyers), is seemingly the proverbial last nail in the coffin. I honestly believed they'd have a new product offering straight after the Chinese new year holidays (having pulled the S5), but seeing nothing is up yet on their site, I've got that feeling of the begining of the end ....
Bitmain never had any agreement to do anything with syscooling over S5s, it was only unofficial on syscooling's part. 'Bitmain's' large batches of gear were often being sold on behalf of other customers.
