Butterfly labs officially announced shipping... prepare for the bullrun!!
or not...
Coming of ASICs means just one ... selling pressure. People invested a lot into ASIC hardware and they need to cover the costs. The question is if there's still enough buyers to keep the price at these levels after all the news bitcoin-mania ended. We are in the bear market now. The price may slowly go downwards throughout the whole 2013 like it did after 2011 crash.
I see this differently. There must be thousands of pre-paid orders to be filled, so no effect on btc price until new orders are pouring in
Further, price is tracking difficulty. As the difficulty zooms up towards and past 10 million the integrity of the Bitcoin network becomes phenomenally strong, dragging in more investors who might have been sitting on the sidelines worried about network security from hacking.