We have made most of them, and in most cases they will ship faster than 6-8 weeks.  Many have already sold.  But assembly is slow and very meticulous.  As you can imagine, we have many security concerns, so there are very few people who get to handle these things and the process, by design and necessity, is extremely slow to produce a finished product.  And only one person ever sees the private keys before they are destroyed from our records--and that person is me.  I am the CEO and I engrave the coins myself.  I also do the ciphers and much of the packaging.  Tamper proofing cases like this is a challenge.  It's slow and tedious work.  But thorough.  We built in 6-8 weeks just in case we got big orders.  We would rather our customers be pleasantly surprised than disappointed.  

As to your fraud concerns; i.e., waiting to deliver them to see what the market does, or cancel the order: First of all, we are a licensed money transmitter and a registered MSB.  If we mess around like that, we get shut down pretty quick.  We'd rather have a successful business than play games. As a money transmitter, we are bonded with the government.  That means they have a lien on a huge pile of money that we fronted, and if we mess with you, they take it and probably throw us in jail.  Doing stuff like this is very challenging from a regulatory compliance point of view, and very expensive.  

This, by the way, also answers the question about markup.  In a business like this, you have to build some costs in to markup because it is VERY expensive to comply with the government's requirements.  This is also why we couldn't get these things out in 2013.  We had the coins done, but the government got in the way of our selling them legally.  But we do things by the books here at Alitin Mint, albeit resentfully at times in the case of government regulations.  And you will get your coins at the price you ordered them, whether or not, or how, the market fluctuates.  Try us.  

Another comment on cost: you're not buying an arcade token here.  Much respect to physical bitcoins that have come before us, but this is not like other physical bitcoins.  These coins are a limited edition set designed by a very prestigious sculptor, and they are pure silver.  They will last a lifetime or longer.  And unlike the arcade tokens, there are no corny stickers that deface the coin or decrease its aesthetic once redeemed.  Our public addresses and private keys are *engraved* on these coins.  Permanently.  Then they are sealed in a tamper proof case with many layers of security.  I could go on, and I did detail some of the advantages in my original post, but to summarize: these are just different.  Our site explains more.  www.alitinmint.com.  

And yes, we will work with reputable escrow, but we will do our own due diligence on any escrow services or escrow agents before we agree to it.  The "trust but verify" thing works both ways; we don't want to be cheated either. And we will charge a fee for escrow as well.  TBD on a case by case basis.