What people seem to be getting horrifically wrong with their predictions is difficulty simply can't rise forever. Follow the chain now:
Proposed: Difficulty will rise to the point that the only widely available ASIC won't be viable [B3 @100 for example. Note that Avalon homebrews are only ~40% cheaper]
-> So if no unit purchased will ROI, ever, who is buying additional ASICs?
-> If no one is buying ASICs, why is hash rate still rising?
-> If hash rate isn't rising, difficulty isn't going up
-> Difficulty plateaus.
Some of these calculations just don't make sense, reaching difficulties of several million. Yes ASICs are POWER profitable until several billion in some cases, but they're not PURCHASE profitable. Not purchase profitable = no new ASICs = no rising difficulty.
Its a catch 22 that difficulty will rise at an extreme rate for a sustained period of time, making everything unprofitable.
You know what is really scary? I had no idea this would be the result. I strongly suspected ASICs were
way overpriced, but I hadn't (at that time) done the actual math.
When I did, wow, was I disappointed....(an understatement)
I was just changing the code slightly right now to make it easy to use for a newbie (so they can stand up to the ASIC manufacturers and plug in their own numbers then tell them to lower their prices).
I just plugged in 24% in the first week and left the other blocks at 15%. What is extremely scary is that the final BTC produced at 1 year plunged from 104 BTC to 93 BTC simply by changing that first week.
People are apt to think the spreadsheet is somehow exaggerating the situation, right? But the spreadsheet is pretty damning. We only have to wait 7 days and look at the numbers. My worst fear is that the week after this, the next difficulty jump will be worse than 24%.
If that is so, the amount of BTC generated takes a nose dive at the end of the line (day 365). The profits wiped out are staggering.
Fook 70Gh/s. You'll need a TerraHash just to keep up with the network difficulty and eroding profits.