Entropy - I get charged on my credit card all the time before a shipment is made. The company I work for does the same. I have never heard of it violating any sort of consumer protection laws.
@SgtSpike,
Clearly Im not getting my point across. Lets try a different approach.
Assume I have 28nm fab in my mothers basement and I just finished my asic miner. I put it up for sale, long before BFL; 100 GH, 1W, delivery in 3-6 weeks. You can order today.
Will you order one if I asked $100K ? $10K? $5K? $1K?
Ok, I'll bite.
At 100 GH/s with negligible electricity usage, I would stand to make nearly $10,000/month at current price/difficulty ratios.
Most reasonable people would expect a ROI of equal to or greater than the stock market (in this case, greater, since Bitcoin investments are still generally very risky). I personally would like to see payback within 6 months, but would probably accept a payback of up to 1 year.
So, if the price is $60k, payback in 6 months, I would order. If it is $70k=$120k, payback in 7 months, I might not. If it is $120k+, I definitely would not.
Now, say I have the knowledge (or an educated guess) that you might drop the price from $60k to $10. Ok, fine. My payback period just got increased from 6 months to 3,000 years. Whoops, should have seen that one coming. It'll pay back, but not in my lifetime!
Ok, so the most I am willing to risk is a 6 month payback at current rates, but with the expectation that the price could drop to as low as $10, and a maximum of 3 years payback if it does. If the price drops to $10 for 100 GH/s, I could expect 1.3 million of these boxes to be purchased, eventually, at the current price point of ~$5/BTC. With 1.3 million, we'd have 131M GH/s, or 131.4 PH/s of network power. The payback on these boxes would be 6 months at that price/difficulty ratio, so they'd be generating around $1.60/month worth of BTC.
Still, those 1.31 million boxes wouldn't be produced and sold in a day. It would take months, perhaps years to get that many produced, packaged, sold, and shipped out. I would be expecting this, and would maybe expect difficulty to double every 2 weeks at the most. So, the first 2 weeks, I would make $5,000, the second two weeks, $2,500, third two weeks, $1,250, etc. Basically, my revenue would virtually max out at just below $10,000 by the time my goal ROI of 6 months is up. I'd still be making the $1.60/month extra, but that amount would be negligible compared to my initial investment.
Of course, I want to have some extra money for my time and effort after it's all said and done. So, if I am expecting $10,000 in revenue, the maximum I would be willing to pay might be around $7,500.
Your turn.