All interesting, but missing a slight point. When the difficulty goes up, and new hardware comes out, many people stop mining...and the value of BTC increases.
If it doesn't, there really is no point in buying hardware anymore.
Imagine ordering a next gen miner, lets say 2THs. You probably won't get it before May. Going by the predicted revenue you would only earn about 1.5 BTC....and the hardware would cost you 6 BTC.
EDIT: Let me just add, I understand cloud hashing will never be good value compared with owning the equipment, but when you take into account delivery times, product failures, scammers, it can be a way to make some BTC.
Very well said. Too many haters out there. Its profitable I promise, I have been in only a day and have managed to pull out .50 coins. Tell me thats not a good profit for a days work even if I never go back and I will have to call you Mr. McMoneybags:)
EDIT+
Also another thing not taken into account is the merged mining that happens. I read a guys post a few days ago that started with .02 coins a few months ago and wrote a program to reinvest his mined coins into GHs and he had almost doubled his money in a month and tripled in 2..so thats my friends in the financial world is called a good investment.
And that, ladies & gentlemen, is your typical "snake oil seller's" sales pitch in the financial world.
Too many salesmen out there is more like it truly is.
In order to "pull out 0.5 coins" in a single day, you'd need to rent approx. 1500GHs - that's a 60 BTC investment that cumulates into
losing you (no active
and successful BTC trading) roughly 0.2 BTC each day as of now.
That's the dirty secret they don't tell you and not even cex.io's ~100% overpriced GHs will get you a total final ROI of more than ~60% of your entire investment after cashing out after a month or longer.
And that's with every BTC/Merged mining fully reinvested, otherwise things look even worse.
I've read those biased "stories" about doubling your money in a month etc... After picking a simple calculator, those stories quickly turned into what they really were - heavily biased fairytales (I agree though, a 40% loss requires pretty thick bias and LOTS of misleading details to cover up).
In short, nothing but blatant lies to lure unsuspecting victims into their realm - preferrably via their cex.io referral program links.
It IS profitable yes... but only for cex.io, that rent out to fools @ over double the price their GHs is worth...