Everybody here agrees that a new GPU mining rig is a bad investment. However most people are not loosing money on the short run, they are making electricity and something extra - just read my numeric examples. This is the complete quote of the OP, the important part bolded for your reading pleasure:
Indeed. My displeasure stemmed not from your inability to understand after all, but rather your choice to ignore the piece of the OP I was working from. With a conditional statement. I'd like to hear more about the above, though. Lots of room in this debate for whether or not it's actually profitable.
If all you want to do is safely invest USD with a guaranteed short-term return, go buy a treasury bond, and stop using 15 point bold font to annoy us with your myopic viewpoints.
Lol. You do realize you're in the "speculation" subforum? Just curious if you can even read the big words at the very top, now.
I give away money all the time, and I suppose that doesn't make sense to you, either: it's called donating.
Again, without a basic understanding of utility, you have nowhere to stand arguing in this subforum. Go look it up, seriously. I have no problem with ulterior motives besides profit for miners. I was only responding to the (OP's presumed, hypothetical) factors driving them. Your reading comprehension is called into question, once again.
There are people who are going to mine bitcoin even if the exchange rate is 1c/BTC, because they like the idea. On the other hand, such people are less likely to dump all the BTC they mine into an exchange for fiat currency.
And there are people like me who could care less about its success as long as I'm betting on the right side for profit. I see a large, generalized outcry about the "commoditization" of bitcoins around here, as if the existence of transactions outside goods/service exchange is the demon of your pet project. 1) Not very libertarian of you, and 2) not very possible.
I think this poll is pertinent to the discusion
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24542.0Many people will continue mining when it costs more to mine than they get in return.
Consider also bitcoin related businesses, who might continue mining at a loss so that the rest of their business can continue making a profit.
"I have no overhead so I always make a profit." i.e. "I steal my power, so who cares?!"