The difficulty has to increase by two orders of magnitude for these to become totally worthless in terms of power usage versus mining income. I plan to run them for the next couple of years. I'm not really worried. If they lose money, so be it, at least they're not costing me anything to run and they are securing the Bitcoin network.
The per watt efficiency is similar to other manufacturers out there, so as long as they are mining profitably, probably I will be too.
In the meantime you're welcome to disseminate your money to operations who will ship in "September" or "October" or whenever, who will probably use your funds to buy ASICs, destroy the network difficulty with them before shipping them out, and then send a slightly profitable brick to your doorstop (as we're seeing with Avalon and BFL, and as I'm sure we'll see with the Klondike etc manufacturers).
I am a bit confused by your thinking here. You plan to run your USB miners for 'a couple years', then turn around and say that other operations will destroy the difficulty and send something that isn't much more profitable than these things in the first place. For this statement to make sense, the USB miners would have to break even before other ASIC companies ship, which probably isn't going to happen. For the same cost you can get ~15x the hashpower but have to wait, wouldn't that mean that the difficulty would have to rise even more in order to make those options worthless as well?
Okay; 15x the hash power for these other devices, which are a bit cheaper per GH/s. For these devices to lose money mining (versus electricity), we need the overall network hash rate to increase beyond 100 fold what it currently is now. At that point, everyone is likely losing money unless someone comes out with a way more energy efficient process. There shouldn't be any point in the next couple years where I'm losing much money mining with these. Maybe I'll make $250 fiat bucks back, or $100, or $1000. Doesn't really matter to me; I'm supporting the BTC network by a decentralized means.
No one can tell what the price of BTC will be in the future, and also what the network hash rate will be in the future. The price may fall to the point where it's not profitable for large ASIC mining companies to continue their operations mining or manufacturing products (similar to what happened after the 2011 crash), the difficulty could collapse, everyone could start throwing their devices out windows because they are worthless. I can continue mining and losing a few bucks per month with my little USB sticks at pretty much no risk to me (a cheeseburger a month in power -- who cares?). Then we may see the price go up in the long term. One of the best times to be mining BTC before was when it was seldom very profitable by GPU in 2012, because the difficulty kept falling and everyone still mining kept getting more and more BTC; over time the BTC proved very valuable.
This is my high risk investment. I know I'll make at least a little back, I have no worries about the loss of $500, and I'll be securing the network in the meantime.
