Now that 1) GPUs don't really produce any value (unless you have 1000s, even then the power consumption will hinder your progress), 2) the fabled ASICs are in short supply (or well, promiseware for many who have paid to queue), what other options have you thought of (while dropping any illegal ideas out)?
Cloud mining seems to be the thing many have fallen for, as you can get "what you invested" (in theory) a.k.a. your GH/s back by selling your mining share. Trading GH/s makes certain pools very lucrative-- and a ton of others are copying a successful recipe. Again, a pessimist would say you'll never be able to make any BTCs due to the imminent dropping of GHS price. An optimist would think you'll be able to trade your GHS as interest over interest and the earnings (mining profit) would enable you buy more GHS to grow profits faster. You'd also claim that the influx of new users will fight against the lessening of your ratio vs. mining pool growth (TH/s).
"Hosted mining" seems to be one thing, but with fixed-term pricing it seems less lucrative than just owning shares in a cloud environment.
Another option would be to buy "enthusiast products" such as rigs which aren't exactly the "full deal", but you'll either have no chassis, cooling or <add missing component here> vs. the products that are out-of-stock or only coming to market with a long queue upfront. There you might be able to get something glued together, but at a cost-- a gamble against whether you make enough money to cover the cost of the device before the 500 GH/s to 2.0 TH/s machines start populating the mining space.
What'd you prefer to do?
