There's also the possibility that so many people get ASICS fast enough that essentially it becomes a nearly perfect balance and ROI stretches out for a long time- with people making just a touch more then the cost of running them.
BFL's shipping policy states that it will ensure that that happens
Btw that
is going to happen. There's like $500,000 total in pre-orders across 3 major companies and for every pre-order there's 3 people like me waiting to see if ASICs even run stable before they order one. It's going to get really bad really fast.
I think you guys are overestimating the speed at which these guys can manufacture their initial and follow-up batches.
There is going to be demand-side pressure far higher than the supply side can keep up with, we know that for sure from the BFL situation. Maintence mode for these manufacturers will certainly lower our margins of us as well as the manufacturer, but until the supply and demand sides of the equation are more balanced there will be an unusual opportunity to profit that is directly proportional to the number of ASIC-days you are able to get outin advance of parity.
I don't see parity happening (excluding USD/BTC rates) before 2014 at least, we have a long way to go before the manufacturers are at a (almost) modern process node, and lots of margin cuts to go (both leading to better
BTC/Ghs) before the ROI goes out past 12 months.