I think you're out of touch. Almost nobody is mining bitcoins on PCs now, they're mining litecoin derivatives, which have a much better return rate, around 50 times higher than doing the same with bitcoin.
The bulk of people mining bitcoin use custom hardware that's dedicated to that sole purpose,
I did some calculations, and using the most efficient miner I saw (antminer s1) technically you DO make a profit per day right now.
There's a big catch though. The cost is ~$500, with a payback time of around 60 days given perfect conditions (in reality it will be longer since you won't have 100% uptime at 100% hashrate). However in ~10 days the difficulty is expected to jump ~20%, making the payback time 78 days... and the difficulty is only going to keep going up. If it keeps jumping by ~20% every 10 days the miner will NEVER break even because difficulty will rise too fast and it will become unprofitable before you get any ROI.
So yes, if you already have an efficient miner that's already payed for it's self you can beat electricity costs (at least for another month or so). Then you buy new hardware and hope for the best.... though from my back of the envelope calculations none of the current or shipping soon miners will ever give you any RoI unless the price of bitcoin goes way up or the difficulty rises significantly slower then it has been.
It's kind of a hard position to believe, that the vast hashrate currently runnning on bitcoin (almost all of it is expensive custom hardware, not regular PCs) is just ill-informed newbies who never bothered to calculate their electricity costs.
There's a sucker born every minute.
and there is in fact a thriving business in designing more and more efficient hardware for the purpose.
You're right here though. The people who get rich during a gold rush are the guys selling picks and shovels.
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Topic: Bitcoins, e-currency or just fancy crap? (Read 31144 times)