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I use to visit these boards often, until I got screwed by Butterfly and their lack of keeping a goal/deadline of which any normal run company should be able to do. Currently are there ANY ASIC units available to buy yet or are they are still in pre-order lala land and want thousands and thousands of dollars? I was on the list of Kncminer, but saw they wanted over $4k, so I opted out of that.

Welcome back.  Yes, ASIC units are shipping, INCLUDING Butterfly Labs.  I sat on my order, received my Jalapeno 2 weeks ago and have been happily mining with it. Other ASICs are shipping as well from other companies, but very much expensive. 

BFL is starting to deliver, if you can believe it. Yes, there's still a lot of people on that pre-order list, so it will still be a while before you get anything.

ASICMiner sells those little 300MH/s USB devices, as well as those 10GH/s Blades, but both are WAY overpriced. Like nasty outright price gorging.

I don't think Avalon is selling any more batches, but they are selling chips, so a lot of places are opening up to develop boards that use their chips. The most popular one is the Klondike project, this is used by companies like TerraHash. You can order devices from TerraHash that use the Klondike boards and Avalon chips, but there is about a 2 month wait, IIRC.

IMO, those are your 3 main options. I don't know much about KNC, so I can't speak much on them.

The answer is: Either massive wait, massive cost, or massive risk if you want to get into ASIC mining. However it will be the only way to mine BTC meaningfully at some stage in the near future. So I would suggest you either choose one of the above, plunging now because there's no time like the present, or leave it be.

Wait until market becomes more saturated. There are other companies developing ASIC that are getting ready to release and pricing will soon be much more competitive. Once everyone has gone ASIC and difficulty has caught up with it power consumption will be deciding factor for profitability. I expect GPU-like returns to become the norm at that point. 


 This is only my opinion and would love to hear others point of view.

But quite profitable if you just put them straight on ebay and sell to some gullible punters. Of course that can't go on for ever, but easy money for now. As for the moral aspect?