They mine silver for $5-$7 an ounce, it's was pumped and dumped just like Bitcoin is now, by the same people!
Always find the production cost and don't pay much more than that.
Hey good point! What is the miner's cost?
The difficulty is going to raise by a factor of 10 - 100 once the ASICs are released, so I am calculating something like 1/10 to 1 coins per day on a $1299 investment, with 25 - 50 cents of electric costs per day.
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/To pay off $1299 in one year on Windows calculator (scientific mode) is 1299 (inv key) (x ^ y key) = $1 per day. Add the electric costs.
I am assuming only 1 year because not only facing Moore's Law, but also dedicated hardware advances on hashing (but if ASICs is the last big leap, then we could factor in Moore's law for say a 5 year declining income on the same investment).
So it looks like the cost to produce 1 coin is in the range of $1 - $10. That is very rough estimate given only a few minutes of my time invested. Someone else could do a more exhaustive study.
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However there is another way of looking at this. The difficulty tends to rise until the cost of production gets very close to the value of the coins. Because as long as mining is profitable, then more miners enter the market, until the total computational power in the system scales up the difficulty until the cost of mining is nearly equal to the value of the coins mined. This is the prisoner's dilemma flaw of the Bitcoin design.
The absurdity of Bitcoin is the supply is arbitrary and artificially limited. There is no way this can stand in a free market. The creator of Bitcoin must have known what he was doing. And this is probably why he remained anonymous. He has probably cashed in on $millions or will.
He knew very well he would create a ponzi scheme and that he would rich on it.
The creator Bitcoin was another Bernie Madoff. He is not a hero!
You've all been hoodwinked!
Yeah the design is genius, for the creator. The rest of you (who did not get in early) will be victims at the end.
Thanks for inspiring me to write the following:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8671/any-counter-proof-that-satoshi-nakamoto-did-not-design-a-ponzi-scheme-on-purpose