This seems rather premature. I suspect they saw Cointerra coming on the scene, and wanted to take away as much pre-order capital from them as possible. Good luck.
Yeah, Cointerra is supposedly going to deliver in November. If KnC delivers in early November, it'll probably pay for the cost difference at least (hopefully).
I actually doubt the difficulty slope will continue on the same exponential.
I think that's a very naive assumption.
But feel free to throw your money at another ASIC manufacturer when the track record for the entire industry is months to years late on delivery. I for one am not interested unless there is a guaranteed refund or discount for late delivery to compensate for the loss in ROI.
Maybe you should pay attention to what I was actually saying: I think the slope 'exponent' is actually going to increase as all these large players dump their ASICs. Once people realize it's not sustainable people will spend less on chips and the slope will start to go back down.
I expect it will follow a sigmoid function:
But it obviously can't continue exponentially forever. Think about it.
The problem is that it will start to 'level off' when the cost is about break-even with electricity, as it did with GPUs.
Right now though, a HashFast unit would break even in 10 days. At increased difficulty (quadrupled by BFL + this alone), you're still only looking at 40 days. Difficulty would have to rise to 24 times its current rate in order to see the 8 month break even point. I don't see that happening by October by any means. Because of this, I think this is still a reasonable investment, should it be legitimate and they deliver on time.
I don't really trust anyone to deliver on time anymore though.
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