knc looks like a good deal if they ship first. BFL has been at the front of controversy since the start of their announcement. Lucky I never order from them.
I agree that KnC appears to be much more professional than others in terms of engineering and marketing, but imagine the amount of power they intend to introduce into the bitcoin network. The guy that is first in line bought one saturn and one jupiter. That's over $11,000 USD with shipping. At the targeted chip power, this guy would be able to do 600 GH/s, generating $49,305 USD per month at today's difficulty. There are a couple of problems with this scenario that don't jive with common business instinct. To protect mining profitability, builders must control how much computing power they release on the network rather than distribute as much as possible as quickly as possible. This is the problem that affected BFL. They sold as much as possible without ever intending to ship everything immediately. If ASICs were distributed widely and cheaply, mining profitability would return to previous levels for everybody, neither the miners nor the engineers would have extraordinary ROI. So, right now we have sort of a lottery situation, where the developers and early investors profit the most. Late adopters of ASIC mining will experience the same profitability they had with GPU's last year. The other issue concerns the future of bitcoin itself. If KnC or any other company can deliver in quantity, they are also in a position to hijack the blockchain. I believe that ASICMiner has the ability do a 51% attack today, they just won't because it would topple the house of cards. It's better to milk the cow for many years rather than kill it for steaks. In the current situation, the future of bitcoin is controlled by a few powerful entities such as BFL, MtGox, Avalon, and ASICMiner. Others may join the ranks soon. As long as they don't screw up royally, the currency remains useful, but if a large disturbance in the force were to occur (borrowing from star wars), the value of the coin could easily go back to nothing.
