what i hate the most about all of this is the lack of numbers from BFL. if as said... enough are pre-sold where the difficulty/hashrate rises enough.. unless bitcoin price increases by a drastic amount, its entirely possible that people will have great difficulty paying off their hardware from bitcoin sales. as mentioned... hardware prices will more then likely drop as well, but they would have to drop enough where people could buy back into the race with potential profits on the horizon. thats also assuming BFL doesnt drop the price before everything has finished shipping, causing even more people to rush in and buy more without ever knowing how many are currently sold.
one thought that keeps crossing my mind is "is bfl gaming the community?" by that i dont mean a scam. i mean are they keeping their sales numbers hidden, with the specific intention to sell as many as possible, regardless of the fact they know that everyone buying units after sales number ### will have virtually no chance to pay off that unit. if we had those figures we could calculate profits fairly accurately and reasonably judge whether its OK to buy. the more i think about it the scarier this all feels.
on the other hand it could be the opposite. there sales are doing really bad and they dont want anyone to know. hoping people will order more so its not plainly visible by network hashrate that BFL didnt add much to it.
of course i should also mention... if they are a good company... and good people. and know that people in the latter orders wont be able to pay off their hardware... they could ... refund some money... or perhaps... upgrade people to increase their hashrate to allow them to make more money to offset that. either way, the risk is potentially huge unless you can afford to throw money away on a gamble.
With that said, and not knowing what BFL is doing in regards to all of this, this is all speculation on my part.
One thing is for certain, avalon has specific batches and we know months in advance what they will be. assuming they plan to ship more then 2 units(china dont count. lol
j/k china)
if im totally way off the mark somewhere... forgive my late night... erm early morning post.