[icoder]

Well, just as with disk storage, scaling up doesn't mean things get cheaper per unit, because you'll have to pay for infrastructure that you take for granted at low scale (cooling, storage, security, power, network, etc). Many customers mining at different locations could therefore be more profitable as a whole than one company doing all the mining, especially since many hobbyists don't count their hours like a company has to.

Also, BFL will benefit from the share of users that will not use their equipment to the max for whatever reason and they may not have the equity required to do the upfront hardware investment.

[nwh]

Completely different situations. Actually building an ASIC design is expensive, has a lot of cost in research and development, and the batch sizes are in the millions of dollars. You do benefit from scale of supply in the chips themselves, and you don't need to worry about pretty consumer cases and electrical safety certifications. Once you've paid off the R&D cost you're basically in the green (bitfury sold his up until this point, then abruptly stopped).