The difficulty is killing everyone, including stocks such as bASIC. I read earlier today that any BFL device that arrives later than September 1st will be unprofitable with the current difficulty rising trend.
Unfortunately that isn't just affecting just BFL customers, it affects bASIC and all other securities or similar. I think the way they should be focusing on now, is using sites like Middlecoin, or multipool (when they implement their auto-exchange feature) and using GPU's for mining. I know they're highly in-efficient, but they can generate more profits mining than ASICs can, I never thought I'd say that, but I guess things change, aka the difficulty of bitcoin mining.
Hi guitarplink. I find this line of thinking questionable. Difficulty will go up until mining is no longer profitable for those with inefficient gear and/or high overhead. It cannot go up far beyond this point because many(most) will stop mining which will cause difficulty to fall. While the pre-order madness has created a market distorting force, it will not last forever. If you skim the forums here you will note a growing resistance to the risky pre-order model. bASIC-Mining is well capitalized and IMO well positioned to weather this storm.
We're mining with GPUs now on Middlecoin...they earn next to nothing. They're nowhere near as profitable as ASICs. This will not change in the near future.
Cheers.