I dont understand why anyone would preorder when
1) BFL isnt giving any indication of how many TH they are able to sell this year or the next, nor are they saying how many preorders they already have received. How on earth are you going to estimate ROI when you cant estimate the difficulty 6 months from here within an order of magnitude?
2) you get no guarantees whatsoever, not on shipping order, not a price freeze guarantee, nothing.
2) They make no promise not to mine with their own hardware (AFAIK) or to not sell in bulk 1000s of ASICs to, say, some ambitious mining asic company ran by a UK guy with a Russian sounding name. For all I know those asics could find their way to a datacenter before anyone here gets their first jalapeno.
3) They rushed the preorder so badly, taking money so early (even though they supposedly got a VC capital injection), ... one has to wonder if they know something we dont.
Anyway, best of luck to everyone that ordered. I predict a financial bloodbath.
If there's going to be a financial bloodbath, it will be much worse for those investing in new GPUs or FPGAs. We know that ASIC is the future of mining. Whatever the ROI turns out to be for early adopters of ASICs, odds are it will be much better than it is for later adopters. So far, the history of mining has favored early adopters, and I don't see any reason to think this is going to change. But it is risky for sure. Personally, I think the biggest risk for those investing in ASICs is if sha 256 is compromised. GPU and FPGA miners could adapt, but ASIC miners would need new hardware, their old hardware becoming useless. I don't know how likely this is or how soon it could happen, but it is a possibility.
