BFL are infamous for overpromising, Im not going to bet on when they will deliver, I would never order from them, but the reality is also that its now a 100+ employee company (Knc is what, 10 employees?) that has been raking in preorders for an eternity now and have been shipping close to 1000 miners per day recently. Miners that are more complex to manufacture and assemble than Monarch. Considering they have not yet dropped their price one penny, I suspect they are not short on orders.
As for the combined network hashrate, IMO a better way to estimate it is simply looking at the profitability. As long as mining is substantially more profitable than it costs in electricity, the hashrate will go up as fast as all vendors combined can deliver. At todays BTC price, and assuming ~$0.1-0.2/KWH that means a race towards 500- 1000 PH. Anyone who thinks we will be at 20PH next July is smoking some weird stuff.
Yes 20PH next July is smoking some weird stuff but so is 2000PH i guess.
I don't think the end game calculation will be a good prediction for the next 6 months. But it is interesting. But I guess you need to include the price end game for bitcoin also in that calculation. I also believe that the end game of mining will be mining companies with employees wanting pay, stockholder wanting dividents, replacement cost of equipment etc... so I electricity won't be the only cost it must cover, but it will of course be the largest one.
I believe that in a 6 months timeframe estimation of production capacity and the current orderbooks will propably give the best estimate. I could be wrong of course.
But back to BFL is there any information, excluding from Josh who I think might over promise a bit, of how large their orderbook is and how large their production capacity will be when/if they start delivering. Is there any past estimation before the conversion to Monarchs?