I fully expect that they will start mining themselves as soon as they fulfill all the existing orders. A peculiar feature of the ASIC market is that unless you

I fully expect that they will start mining themselves as soon as they fulfill all the existing orders. A peculiar feature of the ASIC market is that unless you are making really a lot of chips, it's entirely reasonable to assume that the marginal cost of creating one more chip is zero. If your production volume is below tens of thousands, almost all of your costs are going to be masks and design. In that way, selling an ASIC is like selling software -- at first you need pay huge sums for development, and then you can duplicate your product at (almost) no cost. So what probably happened is that Butterfly labs realized a market opportunity, but they didn't have the money to exploit it. So, the presold some millions of dollars worth of hardware, used that money to design it and make the masks, and then delivered the first few batches to fulfill those orders. And at the end of the day, they don't just have whatever profit they made on the miners, they still have the masks, and can now make more miners for peanuts.