No it won't be 22 billion. But 4-5 billion by April is very possible. Just wait till hardware is marked down which will cause more irrational buying. These ASIC chips and boards probably cost $50 each. ASIC manufacturers will adjust accordingly so they can continue to sell equipment. The ball is in their court.
Or not. The DC regulators on the board cost more than that.
Can ASIC prices come down? Yes but even with free ASICs the balance of the system is still going to have some cost and those costs are unlikely to get massively reduced over time. An x00 watt PSU is going to have a non zero cost. PCB creation and assembly, DC regulators, even mundane things like fans, heatsinks, cables, and cases. There is no Moore's law or massive markup on these components. With free ASICs you still wouldn't have $50 boards.
The best "kits" i have seen thus far to make costs low is Bitfury chips with c-scape design.
Leave's the cost of the incidentals up the the purchaser rather than the manufacturer/seller
For bitfury the original first batch of chips cost was priced at $5 a GH. At least according to Tytus's picostock post ...
Summary:
Strong aspects:
- low investment costs: only $5 / 1GH/s (4 times cheaper than competing products)
- low maintenance costs due to low power dissipation of the chip: approximately 0.2-0.3 Watt / 1GH/s (4-20 time better than competition)
- 4 year manufacturer warranty
Weak aspects:
- chip not tested yet, tape out in 1 month (full mask, engineering run), final simulation results will be posted in 2 weeks
- deployment of 100TH-mine in July 2013
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140366.msg1494509#msg1494509