bad news: at least two more weeks(or one more diff adjustment if you prefer), you heard it here first.

I know people love to bitch and moan at BFL and rightfully so in some cases. But I have to say if BFL brought this chip from design to market in one year then that is outstanding. Regardless of what they promised, what they accomplished is no easy task. A lot of people aren't aware of the complications involved when attempting something like this. It can take a lot longer than a year to bring a new design to market. Avalon uses a 110nm process so it's no surprise they were able to deliver first. Technologically BFL's 65nm process is years ahead of Avalon. Remember I'm not speaking of what delivery time frame BFL originally promised, that has no relevance here. I'm speaking strictly of what they accomplished and to put it lightly it is amazing.   

buy it! I'm not a miner, I'm a trader!

Sorry, I shouldn't have given a specific number.  Truthfully, I have no idea how many people have received them.  But I am sure that some of them are not reporting that they have received them.

My point still stands that geeks get overly excited about unboxing brand new tech toys, especially if they know they are one of the first to receive it.

Oh, no, they're still talking.  Mostly going into tinfoil-hat areas of "well, the forum poster has a BFL sig, they must be working for them and making this up!"

On to batch three, we at Avalon did not even wish to sell another batch. If you recall, our original plan was to produce only one batch, sell chips to thwart the centralization of mining, but due to the lackluster performance of our competitors we are here today as the exact centralization we tried to decouple. In addition, this delay is eating into our timeline for this project's future goals and various other projects. To be frank: it was a simple decision of build a mining farm ourselves and mine for a month or so to get the funding for things like the SMT line and next generation development vs. raise the price and sell units trying to get the money earlier to counterbalance the delay we have had. So, we came up with some terms and left the choice to the community.munity.

We are ramping up and the shipping of batch two has indeed begun, albeit not up to speed, we expect this situation to improve in a week or so once the equipment finish installing and the new, additional crew get use to the process.

Thank you for the detailed analysis as well.

So let's analyze your statement "difficulty will go up about 10X by August":

Let's make it by September because let's face it none of the players have met their self-made deadlines strictly so far.

Current Global Hashrate: 65 TH/s
Current Difficulty: 9.0 m

By August September:
Avalon batch 2 + 3: 1200 X 65 GH/s = 78 TH/s
Avalon raw chip increase: 500k X 282 MH/s = 141 TH/s
Big Time Coin hashrate increase: 500 X 96 GH/s = 48 TH/s
BFL hashrate increase (wild guess) = 50 - 100 TH/s
ASICMINER hashrate increase = 50 - 200 TH/s

Total hashrate increase: 367 - 567 TH/s

Difficulty after adjustment in September:

(9/65) X (367) = 50.8 m
to
(9/65) X (567) = 78.5 m

Or an increase of 5.6 X current to 8.7 X current difficulty.

Also, people will switch off their GPU miners and FPGA miners around this time or soon thereafter, mitigating the difficulty increase for September - December.  And there are no new technologies on the horizon that will exponentially increase difficulty thereafter, it will grow linearly. So while Avalon's difficulty calculation of doubling every month seems accurate for the next 3 months, it will not double any more after that and revert to more linear, less exponential growth.

So your Batch #3 avalon, assuming a cost of 100 Bitcoin and a hashrate of 96 GH/s, recieved in June or July, could potentially break even in 2 or 3 months.  Definitely buy and hold, you will find no better ROI anywhere.

Lol, the current difficulty is what, 8.9million? So at 91mill your 66GHs Avalon is going to do a coin every 3 days. So much for the ROI. At least they will be dirt cheap if they keep to their pricing formula. They will probably not get enough return on that formula to keep making them.