You see why pre-orders are such bullshit, both for the buyers and sellers? The whole network has only touched 400 this week, and as I write this is humming along at around 340.
It actually got close to hitting 500:
http://i.imgur.com/dBEVHmK.pngSo now, here comes a guy who says, in effect: "Uh, yeah, were coming with 500 in November, and we're going to hold on to some chunck of the total thereafter. You all are welcome to buy in to 60% of our action, because if there aren't some small stakeholders, and there's only six of us in the whole network, it won't be good."
So, then ASICMiner has to increase. And buzzDave has to increase. And BFL has to smuggle a couple more minirigs out the back door. And KnC has to redefine its own hosting, and the hosting deals they've already made. And God knows what goes on in China with those now-commoditized 130nm chips.
The point is, any growth rate you put on this stuff can be -no, will be- black swanned. You wanna buy fixed hash, delivered to you at an uncertain time point in the future? Bend over.
Someone has to do a pre-order, other way there is no way to get chips. If you put in an order a the fab, it takes 3 months get your chips. That's a pre-order.
So the only way to produce ASICs is to crowd-fund through pre-orders or an IPO, or fund your venture privately which means only people with hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars to burn can get involved in Mining.
This idea that some people have that a company is going to invest millions of their own dollars into designing
and producing their own chips, then give them away for far less then what they'll earn on the network with same day shipping instead of mining with them themselves is a pipe dream.
No one is ever going to sell chips they have on hand and paid for for less then what they would expect to make in profit over whatever time horizon they're looking at.
Now, that cost will go down as the difficulty goes up - and it might get so high that chip companies won't even bother trying to mine, in which case chips will be very cheap, and mining will barely cover electrical costs.
