it all depends on how avalon and BFL chips do. If Avalon or BFL can be the "AMD" of asics then there's competitive force for white-box asic builders to build profitable miners. Else they won't sell any. And there will be pressure for Avalon and BFL to produce affordable chips. Right now there IS NO COMPETITION only promises. There's a handful of pre-orders being delivered, and Asicminer has the only production devices, so all the GPU miners are at a 50x disadvantage. When there's 3 companies competing to make the cheapest chips and producing real products, there will be incentive to produce profitable miners. Else nobody would buy them, and the chip makers would go bust. Look at Intel before AMD. Look at Nvidia before ATI/AMD. AT&T before the rest of them. Prices came down drastically with competition..
Maybe not ones that make 100% return in 90 days, maybe more like 10-15% return over the year, accounting for difficulty increases. That sure is better than 3% in a CD.
Well here lies the biggest problem. Would you sell something for 10 million? If you can produce 10000 million with it and have the monopoly over production?
What makes you think this factories or produces will not just hold on purpose production? They will. It happen with diamonds, and its happening with Bitcoin.
Bitcoins will become the diamonds of e-currency, only a few big producers and some others in the delivery chain.
Its amazing how much trust some of you have, while GPU miners are disconnecting themselves every day, and they yet are able to receive even one single ASIC unit, while some others have thousand of them and are mining by the minute bitcoins.
When exactly do you think it will be right to mine with ASIC? Next year? In 3 years? I don´t see a single market left for individual miners in the next months from now. Mining is already a novelty.....
And that is very sad, because as opposed to real mining, you where supposed to be able to use your spare computing devices to grow that thing called Bitcoin.
The market prices going down will just show how right im on this as time goes on. Unless we see a dramatic shift like a change in the protocol, or different manufacturers of ASIC actually delivering on time.