So if you anticipate BTC appreciation, you should buy BTC. The more BTC appreciates, the worse bet mining is, because difficulty increases. If it stayed the same, mining would be proportional to direct holding of BTC. To add insult to injury, it does not even scale the other way round making mining better if the BTC fiat price dropped - in this event the hashrate declines only slowly, making it punitive to sell BTC to cover the cost of electricity. In any event, the ASIC manufacturers would likely lower their prices for existing equipment, and develop more power efficient technology.
Currently at $12 per BTC, the 7,200 BTC bitcoin miners earn each day are worth $86,400. That amount is distributed among all the miners proportionally based on the amount of hashing work performed.
Exactly. It is a novel concept, but extremely important to realize, that no matter how much hashpower is connected to the network, the number of BTC per day stays the same.
For this reason, we are entering a low, not high profitability age for mining. ASIC technology makes all previous equipment outdated, and it is projected that the price of new ASICs will enter a steep decline, making it necessary to buy more and more every month just to keep the output constant (because others are also entering the game).
Good for Bitcoin network. Bad for the miners. The more bitcoin rises, the better it would have been just to keep the bitcoins, instead of investing it into mining.
How many BTC did people invest in BFL preorders? Let's say $5M, it was 1 million BTC back then. How on earth are they going to mine 1 million bitcoins with such equipment, as:
- there is no more than 10 million bitcoins more to be mined, ever
- it's realistic to assume that the equipment price per hash will be slashed 90% in 12-18 months following the launch, and network hashrate will rise accordingly
- electricity & other costs
- equipment will become outdated (hash/watt-ratio)
Great call by rpietila.
In October 2012, when many were ordering lots of ASIC mining equipment, he predicts ASIC mining to become a low profitability investment, physically unable to make back the amount of bitcoins it costed.
Today one year later ASIC miners have made back - on average - barely 20% of the bitcoins they originally invested, losing 80% of their bitcoins*.
(*This is a rough estimation, the first to market, for example ASICMINER, made back 6 times more bitcoins as originally invested, most however made back not even 10% of their bitcoins.)