So you guys are saying that the boxes that KnC are currently pre-selling for $7000 and BitFury are preselling for $8000 for October delivery would struggle to be priced for December delivery at $1000? That seems like a very steep price decrease and I think you might be over-egging the devaluation... and if anyone really believed that, no one would buy a $7000 box for October!
Someone doesn't understand difficulty vs hashrate.
A $7000 KnC Box in Late September/Early October should be able to recoup it's costs in 3 Months or so, making considerably less every month.
By the time Late December rolls around (And don't kid yourself, every time someone says the month they plan to release, count it as the very last day of that month), at the same hashrate (400GH) if it costs over $1,000 you will probably see even less of a return even if the power consumption is extremely low or you have free power.
If KnC releases the amount of Hash Power that is predicted, we can easily see 300M-500M Difficulty come January 1st.
Either way, with all the new players popping up left and right even with the Credentials these guys have I will be hard pressed to make another pre-order that is estimated to ship around 5 months from now. I know there are new people here who are not aware of the ASIC Flood that is going to happen over the next 5 months and will end up making pre-orders that are based on current math but they will likely get burned hard.
HashFast/VMC/KnC all plan to ship before December. Avalon Chips haven't even arrived in Bulk yet. Butterfly Labs may eventually start shipping past day 1 (Hah I know).
Unless we start seeing $1-2/GH in Late December/January or an extreme boost to the bitcoin price, there won't be much demand for more mining equipment.
(I for one hope there is a large boost to bitcoin price but that again makes mining even more risky if there is another bubble)
All of that being said,
It is still exciting to see new players enter the market.
It's good for us miners. The original estimated profits were always going to be diluted by new entrants, not mining companies, but miners themselves. The mining companies just serve a purpose feeding the hunger that exists, and the more quality companies we get to choose from that compete against eachother, the better the deal we get.
The waiting game whilst BFL and Avalon attempted to fill a gap was the time to make excessive profits mining if you were lucky to get your hand in an ASIC when all anyone else had was GPUs and FPGAs, and understandably there's some belief, that's in fact that's exactly what BFL and Bitsyncom were doing for themselves.
Personally I see this ASIC revolution very quickly becoming as profitable as GPUs once were. Of course profit will be squeezed out until new entrants are no longer satisfied and stop purchasing. The guys that had the FPGAs did best and most consistently for the length of time they bridged from FPGA to ASIC as they were able to readily add to their rigs with immediate purchasing for a decent amount of time during the ASIC delays.
I don't believe we will get anywhere near $1,000 per Gh by December though, no way, not unless there are a huge amount of buyers waiting in the wings to purchase as and when a product is available without pre-order. I reckon it will have a more inversely proportional linear effect in price as manufacturers compete against eachother dropping bit by bit so as not to shave too much from their own profits too rapidly. They are developing companies at the same time and not even they know what the capacity for new custom is yet. I think we'd be lucky to see $4,000. These new guys wouldn't be making back their NRE costs otherwise. Perhaps after they can fight between themselves.
At the moment the 'Bitcoin craze' is focused on delivering this new tech to process and verify BTC transactions, negating the fact there's not a huge deal of transactions actually taking place. That's what needs to improve or all this has been for nothing. The money is in Bitcoin's mainstream adoption and encouraging that takes place through developing innovative ways for the public to adopt and use Bitcoin for it's low transaction costs, secure payment methods (as long as they treat it as they do cash and understand the lack of recourse) and varying anonymity. This new payment requires some education for people, we've seen enough people get scammed here, and the members of this forum are meant to be Bitcoin savvy. Traditional payment methods cater for the inherent stupidity in the general public and the inability for them to take responsibility for their actions. That's a huge barrier for Bitcoin to overcome before it's used frequently as a mainstream currency...
but will they deliver? 