Competition would be great, but the only thing I see driving the price down is the market being flooded with ASICS. BFL releasing in the numbers they have promised should accomplish this. If you want to see a $1299 60gh/s miner, one of three things has to happen.
- Bitcoin exchange rate drops to around $10/Coin
- ASICs cause difficulty to surpass 700 million, yet exchange rate is stagnant
- New honest ASIC developer is willing to gamble on increasing BTC prices and offers BTC preorders to fund development
With the amount of new scams popping up every day, I seriously doubt the last one is going to happen. The real dilemma we have here is that we've already funded Avalon and BFL development with large amounts of preorder money. Now that both companies have a working or close to working product, what is their incentive to sell you a device that pays for itself in 2-3 days? Even if there is competition in the market, BFL and Avalon can make at least 20x as much just mining with the equipment they build.
Of course, if BFL can really push out 400 devices a day, they would quickly run out of DC space, so they have the highest potential of actually selling devices for profit. And in that event, at current exchange rates, I would expect BFL devices to at least double in price once more. If BFL does keep their price at 2x original, I don't expect to see another consumer batch from Avalon any time soon.
