I did say it was all speculation.
But since no one in an official capacity (havelock or amhash) has made a statement so far about dividends in this period, there will be plenty of people (myself included) that will hope for the best.
However, if a price bubble happens because people think they will pay the dividends, you can make a big profit on the share price alone and just not wait to find out if they actually pay them or not.

Depending on how this works, there's plenty of reason to buy after people are done dumping.
At the very least, we should expect price to go up once dividends start up again - if you buy at bottom price, you win.
But there might be an even more compelling reason: Lets assume that on March 1st (or whenever) there will be a huge dividend payout for the previous 20 or so days: roughly 0.0001 BTC per 1 unit which currently costs under 0.0008 BTC to buy. That one dividend alone is worth 12.5%. And I'll assume it will be paid in full to whomever owns the shares on March 1st (not split over who owned them in previous days). So it becomes really profitable to buy on that day before dividends. Since many people will expect the huge payout we might see a big buy order queue and a little price bubble that will burst as soon as dividends are paid. Of course it's all speculation, but if it happens like this there's plenty of great opportunities - all of which involve buying/holding in this break period.

I used to have GHS on CEX about a year ago, but moved to greener pastures. Was looking at them today and realized the GHS price is lower than anything I've seen lately... but then I remembered they have maintenance fees...
So quick math: dustcoin.com says 1 GH/s makes $0.08/month but cex.io/maintenance says fees are $0.105/month for 1GHS.
Is this for real? shouldn't they shut down their inefficient miners at this point as the terms and conditions state? Am I missing something?

Just wonderful Invested in it for the first time last night 1.2BTC, went to bed, woke up to the e-mail announcement, now it's worth 1.08 and will probably keep dropping.
I can still hope that mining continues and we'll see a huge 20 day dividend payout in March and the price go back up.
But considering my luck so far with bitcoin mining operations and chinese businesses, it's perfectly reasonable for me to expect it is far more likely for their factories to be hit by meteors in the next week than for that to happen.

"In a few days over a week ago"? How about the fact that they are STILL selling the cloud mining contracts on their official website as "starts in May 2014"?

The $24 is for the 1.6gh version of the AntMiner (U1), since the 180gh (S1) version is/has been out of stock everywhere that sells it at 1.45 bitcoins. Again, I would love to know where to get it.
And I don't think comparing BA's offering to competitors is off topic. If people claim their products are uncompetitive, I think that is a perfectly acceptable topic for discussion on this thread.

Wow, this thread is moving fast (and about 1% of posts are actually relevant)
Anyway, Syke, I would love to know where you can buy $5/gh? AntMiners seem to be more like $24/gh which is pure garbage considering I can get $14/gh (@ $600/Bitcoin currently) at cex.io instantly hosted for me...
Is there some miner I don't know about or some secret store, or are people just pulling numbers out of their ass (as usual)?  

.16/day is indeed extremely optimistic, but I think "never make a penny off this machine" is too grim of an outlook. The general direction of the bitcoin price has sortof been an upward trend. With more real money being pumped into the system and difficulty rising it may keep going up. Of course no one can see the future and it can just as easily go back down to under $1 tomorrow. However looking at your own estimate of 12 coins, you would break even if the price of bitcoin is $500 and you would double your investment if the price of bitcoin reaches $1000 again. To me that's pretty good odds since bitcoin is worth roughly $800 right now - which makes miners more profitable at the moment than buying bitcoins outright and hoping it will go up.

I'm more interested in the start time of the cloud mining compared to the shipping time of the X3's
What they do is pretty obvious - you rent 1TH/s for 4 or 6 months then it's over, you don't get to keep any hardware. I believe you even get to choose the pool to mine at.
The price for 6 months hosting per TH is roughly equivalent to the price per TH of the X3. But you don't have to pay customs (which in my case would be 13% of the product's value), no electricity costs, no monitoring the thing, no lost revenue while shipping or if the unit is damaged on arrival. And I assume after 6 months X3's are more than likely obsolete and their resale value at that point might not cover the previously mentioned costs. Depending on how fast difficulty rises the cheaper 4 month cloud rental might be the best bang for the buck Black Arrow has to offer, but at least in my mind the 6 month cloud rental is almost certainly better than buying an X3. Might be different if customs can be avoided and you don't pay for electricity, but even then, the shipping time can still get you. Of course this entire analysis hinges on the cloud offering starting the same time as X3 shipping...

Can anyone answer this?

What about your cloud mining offering? When can we expect those to start working?
The website says "starting March 2014". It has said that for a while now, even back when the X1 and X3 were "end of February".
Are these cloud mining offerings part of the same queue as the X1 and X3: as in you go by the payment date and if it's an X1/3 you ship it, if its a cloud miner you mount and start it?
I've also seen a few people mention a "hosting option" for X1 and X3 which seems to be different than the cloud mining offering (because you get to own rather than rent the equipment) - this isn't described on the website, is it still available?
Thank you for your time.

Very helpful, thanks.

Thanks for the response.
Still hoping to find out what the other values are if anyone knows.

Hello, I'm still rather new to bitcoins. I've only been mining for 2 or 3 weeks.
I've recently purchased a second Radeon 7970 card and my GPU temperatures are now higher.
Anyway, I'll cut to the chase: I've been using GUIMiner, but it became unstable with my new rig, so I've spent half a day compiling and installing CGMiner.
I have it working and it's been running at 1.353Gh/s for the past 12 hours without a crash.

There's however lots of information in the CGMiner that I don't understand. Could someone please clarify the following or at least point me to some article? I've highlighted the things that I don't understand in bold red:

cgminer version 2.11.4 - Started: [2013-04-14 00:10:22]
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(5s):1.368G (avg):1.353Gh/s | A:14147  R:31  HW:0  U:19.0/m  WU:19.0/m
ST: 2  SS: 0  NB: 88  LW: 21524  GF: 2  RF: 0
Connected to NONEOFYOURBUSINESS diff 1 with stratum as user NONEOFYOURBUSINESS
Block: 00830bef53af5c0f...  Diff:7.67M  Started: [12:27:03]  Best share: 10.2K
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[P]ool management [G]PU management [S]ettings [D]isplay options [Q]uit
GPU 0:  90.0C 3594RPM | 677.6M/676.7Mh/s | A:6981 R:16 HW:0 U: 9.35/m I: 9
GPU 1:  75.0C 3804RPM | 677.9M/676.8Mh/s | A:7166 R:15 HW:0 U: 9.60/m I: 9
------------------------------------------------------------------------------

[2013-04-14 12:36:11] Accepted c85095b5 Diff 1/1 GPU 1
[2013-04-14 12:36:12] Accepted 8c8ef7a6 Diff 1/1 GPU 0
[2013-04-14 12:36:13] Accepted 0c669bb9 Diff 20/1 GPU 0
[2013-04-14 12:36:14] Accepted eca34ab6 Diff 1/1 GPU 1
[2013-04-14 12:36:14] Accepted e12997b0 Diff 1/1 GPU 1
[2013-04-14 12:36:17] Accepted 649dd341 Diff 2/1 GPU 0
[2013-04-14 12:36:18] Accepted 86f47f0a Diff 1/1 GPU 0
[2013-04-14 12:36:18] Accepted c60b2214 Diff 1/1 GPU 0
[2013-04-14 12:36:26] Accepted e2ee6815 Diff 1/1 GPU 1
[2013-04-14 12:36:31] Accepted b7bcc10b Diff 1/1 GPU 1
[2013-04-14 12:36:33] Accepted 8d4eef20 Diff 1/1 GPU 1
[2013-04-14 12:36:33] Accepted a8e4b005 Diff 1/1 GPU 0

I'm rather new to Bitcoins and mining and have been using mining pools for about a week so this idea might not be feasible or outright stupid, but then again it might have great potential.

I would like for one of the 4-5 major pool operators to offer a new type of payment method: Lifetime Shares. Here's how they would work: While mining under the pools' usual payment policy you would get the option of choosing a percentage of your earnings to go towards Lifetime Shares. The pool operator gathers these earnings until they are of a somewhat significant value (maybe converts some to $ or other less volatile currencies). Then the pool operator invests these Lifetime Shares into mining equipment. Something like a few server racks to begin with (although more likely the new ASICS hitting the market) and has them mining 24/7. The earnings from these machines is used to pay for their operating costs first (power, employees etc.), then the pool operator takes a percentage based commission and whatever is left is divided between all the members that have contributed Lifetime Shares based on how many shares they own. As more people buy more Lifetime Shares, more hardware can be added. And in order to keep Lifetime Share value from fluctuating wildly, I would set their value in $ rather than BTC based on some official exchange rate.

Pool operators would get additional income, and normal users would get a really low buy-in into efficient Bitcoin mining: not everyone can afford ASICS and even the ones that do can't actually buy them  anywhere except E-Bay at 20x the price. And yes, I get that if this works, it would eventually concentrate a lot of the hashing power in a few centers, but with the limited ASIC availability that will happen anyway.

Sorry for the lengthy message, but let me know what you think. And what are the chances someone would implement this. Doing it myself seems unfeasible at this point, especially considering one of the large mining pools could just swoop in later and take all my clients.