I know its been a very long time since anyone has posted in this thread, but I think it is still very relevant. I am an ASIC n00b. This will be the first ASIC I have ever bought. What has surprised me so far is how little profitability has changed since these were announced. I'm assuming batch 1 was very small. Something tells me batch 2 won't be, and profitability will have a drastic decrease. Still, I see a few assumptions on here that I don't think are true.
1) People assume Bitmain won't ship out miners if they could make more mining.
This may be true, but you have to consider the amount of profit they can make producing these things. Considering the numbers they can release, I can't imagine they would make more mining with these than they can make by selling these, when they can produce them so fast. They may mine to test them and keep changes in difficulty more stable I suppose, but to think they would make more mining than they make pumping out mass-produced hardware with high profit margins seems highly unlikely to me.
2) People assume the difficulty spike will be proportional to the number of new ASIC miners.
In theory this sounds good, but do you really think GPU miners will stick around if they are losing money? For example, if ASIC miners came in and increased network hash rates by 200%, don't you think that the GPU miners would leave equihash, effectively reducing our predictions of difficulty increases?
Obviously, difficulty is going to go through the roof. But by how much depends on how many units will be shipped. I realize that I am taking a big gamble on getting batch 2, but I think it is a fair trade in risk/reward considering how difficulty has so far remained relatively stable. If it's a doorstop, it will be an expensive lesson learned. Still, I wonder if anyone has any reliable methods at determining how big these batches are. Does anyone have any estimates based on anything besides speculation?