ASICMINER hardware has from its inception been a hardly break even, or negative expectation as far as ROI.
Why would they sell them for what they could mine with them? They should just mine with them in that case. Instead, they place the price higher than what they think they can mine with them and sell them to as many suckers as possible.
And it worked... it is truly genius!
well to be fair this is not specific to asicminer, they actually have the lowest cost right now on the market at <1btc per gh. Look in the for sale section all those guys buying up avalon batch 2s and 3s at >1 btc per gh.
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For calculators, i use the below, it is the most straight forward and accurate i can find.
1) use this to find the profitability decline in 12 months based on your own expectation:
http://srkz.net/msc/difficultyprofitslider.html2) then put the profitability decline number from above into this calculator to find the actual profitability, dont forget to adjust the other inputs like hardware cost and time frame (put 12 months) etc.. the numbers look very bad any way you slice it:
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/This is truly a race to the bottom, and we are about 12 months away from it, no matter how much avalon/bfl try to cheat & lie to hold back the asic shipment, the end is coming for mining profitability for retail miners.