Did AngelusWebDesign really create his own soapbox to stand on? wow.

The writer has a point though, mining is slowly becoming unprofitable and dead for smaller miners.
You need to have pretty big farms online now if you want to make decent money.

Expanding is out of question unless you get free or very cheap hardware.

He's probably being overoptimistic - that calculation doesn't include power cost, and assumes stable difficulty for 2.5 months...

Do it for fun, geek value, or ideology, or because you need a room heater...  Not money.

I'm small time, only about 1 Ghash/s, but I'm still finding this to be more than profitable enough to continue. Granted you cant earn a living on it unless you have some serious hardware already, but I'm still making a good $200-300 USD a month after electricity. I'm still buying hardware. I'm even thinking of investing in actual cases and noise dampening foam. Think about it, miners that are compact AND quiet! MADNESS!

Pfft.  Quit.  There is no such quit.  I am mining on my i7 920, my 5850, my Gameboy Advance, my Terratec Aureon 7.1 (7.1 channels of hashing power!!11!) Universe and on my T-Mobile G1 smartphone.

Push it to the limit.

My rigs have been offline most of the day due to the DDoS attack on BTCGuild.  I have not cared to establish alternate pooling arrangements - yet.

I too am curious about the current availability of long-sought-after 5830s on Newegg.  I would not buy them, (1) because I would have to buy another motherboard, CPU, power supply, and maybe add another dedicated 20 amp circuit, and (2) because its not so much the projected difficulty increase - but rather the likely full deflation of the bitcoin price bubble that influences me. 

Mining difficulty, in my opinion, lags the bitcoin price, i.e. difficulty goes up because miners get excited about rising prices and add capacity to their rigs.  But in a situation in which prices are declining, miners may face a situation in which difficulty is not dropping, or perhaps not dropping as fast a bitcoin prices drop.

Miners not adding to their capacity are making a judgement about the future prices of bitcoins.  Therefore miner sentiment/behavior is interesting to me as I consider what signs signal a bottom to the bitcoin bubble deflation.

I'm a new miner only rocking a single 5830 and getting twin 6950 2gb cards. I jumped in because I wanted to make a buck and upgrade my video cards. I do think bitcoins have a future , But I'm not sure if this version of bitcoin will be the future. There are things about the setup i think that need to be improved to gain wider acceptance beyond the geeks.


Until then my cards will keep mining as long as its more profitable then the electric it eats.

Yep.... i a few months when temperatures dip around here, it's going to be nice ^^

There's 10,000s of people folding for free, correction they are PAYING to run their folding rig. Bitcoin is "less profitable"? People will mine for free, people will mine when they lose money. That's already been proven.

The fact it now takes 60-70-80 days to get ALL of your money back for your hardware? It's a non-issue. The next difficulty increase will likely be under 10%. People were figuring on 50% increases a month ago. It's not longer a great way to make quick money, seems like we still have 50k miners out there. If difficulty was 3M and BTC was at $5, you'd still have boat loads of miners.

People are no longer buying up tons of hardware to make a quick buck? That's good news. Miners just dump BTCs on the market as fast as they make them to recover costs. Not having huge influxes of short term hardware which needs to be paid off flooding the exchanges will be great. Difficulty increases will slow, supply will slow, demand will catch up.

BTC doesn't need 50k miners making money hand over fist. Thankfully that's coming to an end.

Do yourself a favor and don't listen to AngelusWebDesign and don't give him the satisfaction of visiting his message board.  He's a total hypocrite.  He will tell you that mining is not worth it, you should dump all your bitcoins, everyone is selling their mining rigs, but he will quietly low ball you on your equipment.  Then he gets mad that you won't sell him a computer that you just bought for 50% off and calls you a 17 year old pimple faced idiot who uses mommy's credit cards to buy video cards.

I'll likely have to keep a window open 24/7 just to keep the place liveable in the Winter. There'll be a 6 foot spot in the grass outside extending from the window which will be like an oasis in 6 foot of snow. Where the grass grows healthy and green and the wildlife comes to live in harmony, outside my window.