The profitability of ASICs is going to decrease at a rapid rate once they start shipping to consumers. Additionally, in a few months the market is going to be flooded with cheap ASICs.

From BFL's perspective if they don't release first they're dead in the water. They don't know where their competitors are compared to them but they recognize it's a winner take all situation. The natural thing to do would be to take pre-orders to fund the manufacturing and start realizing profits now. Also, if your competitors are offering pre-orders you should be too.

This waxing and waning of mining devices is certainly going to become the norm.

* Buy up $10K worth of devices

* Make your money while flooding the market with fast and easy BTC

* Sell off all your hardware after the profit margins have cratered

* Wait for new hardware and rinse and repeat

Personally I will be extremely glad when the first wave hits as the hoarders will start feeling the pinch of inflation.

The evolution was CPU -> GPU -> FPGA -> ASIC. Now that we're at the ASIC stage growth is going to slow considerably. There's no longer order of magnitude gains to be made.

>at the ASIC stage growth is going to slow considerably

Yes, buy these are 110nm v1 designes, it looks like they will be able to squeeze something like 10x per watt by moving to better process and iterating on design. And probably additional 10x in cost by ordering more than current quantities that are in the ballpark of the smallest possible order.

Right now entire network runs at speed equal to all hardware in first two Avalon batches (300 and 600 units). When batch 2 and 3 and BFLs hit in the future, everything else is going to be wiped out. But then it will be wiped out again by the next iteration.

bitcoin does not work that way. Inflation decreases at a set rate.

Difficulty adjusts week-to-week. Being the only guy with an ASIC is like a license to print money. Being the 10,000th person with an ASIC will be like trying to mine with a netbook today.

Supply will always be constant however how it's divided changes -- people who previously enjoyed lack of competition are now having their feet held close to the fire.

Did they collect the money in advance? If not, it seems to me that the shipping time is almost irrelevant.

Yes, you pay at time of order, and wait a few months for the unit.

few months - year...

I see it as a futures contract on the value of the BTC. Selling a mining ASIC locks in profit for the seller, betting that this will exceed the time-value generated from the rig itself. Buying a rig locks in a loss, betting that it will pay for itself. We can't be certain whether the BTC will be at US$1,000 or US$1 a year from now. You could make a case for either side, that's why the contract exists.

Which, by the way, doesn't mean they are betting against BTC. They just elected to take sure profit up front, over less certain profit of potentially greater value long-term.

I don't think so. They probably needed the preorder money to fully develop the device and to be able to manufacture it.

are there any alternatives to this? and some thing that's already selling them and not pre-orders?