There was another maker of bitcoin miners some time ago that would take people&#x27;s money, make the miners, run the miners for itself (pushing back the delivery date), then deliver the miners once they stopped making a sufficient profit.<p>What you are saying is generally true, I agree, but the case of (specifically) money-printing machines has the additional complication of having <i>very</i> misaligned incentives, encouraging fraud. For any good other than money (or bitcoin), the producer of machines won&#x27;t be able to want to  do much with them, as you say.
Money is unusual in that regard because you don&#x27;t need to &quot;use&quot; it to make money, which removes a high barrier that the machine maker would normally face.<p>So you don&#x27;t want to &quot;keep&quot; the money-printing machine for yourself, the incentive is to sell it for the original price after printing some money with it that you keep for yourself.
It doesn&#x27;t guarantee fraud, merely misaligns incentives to encourage it.<p>Setting up such extreme incentives for fraud is such a terrible idea that I am surprised anybody made business with these companies.<p>A somewhat related, legal, phenomenon would be a payment service provider (e.g., Paypal, IIRC) keeping the payments for a bit longer than necessary to earn interest (by investing the money with varying degrees of risk) on somebody else&#x27;s money while that money is in transit.