It is a guessing game.
lets say the difficulty quadruples to 20.000.000 until July 1st. And lets say that's the date one gets his Single SC, mining 60 GH/s. You'd make ฿45.87 per month or $3.200 at an exchange rate of $70.
so the players in the game basically are
- difficulty
- exchange rate
- your fraction of the total hashpower of the network
It's not rocket science, still you have do do some estimations and some math.
the big question is what will the difficulty be in n months - if you consider all of the 900 avalons and all of bfls 60.000 chips mining. I did this calculation but the only result I remember was "I'm okay with that". Maybe someone else has the numbers.
I think I get it now. The bit I was missing is that the network adjust difficulty to only allow a finite number of coins to be mined in a given time period. When the network grows and or hardware improves there is a risk that more coins will be mined that should be mined for that period of time. Therefore the difficulty is adjusted to ensure that the coins aren't found quicker than they should be thus making it very difficult for lesser hardware to solve the calculations. Every 4 years the amount of bitcoins you get for successfully completing a problem is halved so that it becomes even more difficult to mine them. Very clever and indeed the mining analogy is very apt.
Thanks Guys for helping clear it up for me. In a nutshell, once these ASICS ship my mining days are done.
I shall however keep battering my trusted HD5850 for a very meager return, in the vain hope that these things will one day be worth a few thousand and can pay for my kids college fees haha. Some people say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.
BitCoin rocks when you grasp it but 2 things bother me
1) The electricity companies win big but the rewards wont result in lower fuel bills for people. Also bad for the environment
2) The government(s) will declare it illegal tender because they cant tax it. This will mean that it will never become mainstream. You'll be very restricted to where you can spend your coins.
I could see the whole thing dying a death to be honest. If an online pool provider or wallet provider rips everyone off it would knock confidence. Also a major computer crash could result in many coins being lost. Not to mention hackers emptying peoples wallets. If you cant spend proper coins down at "The Nags Head" there's no legs in it long term.
The only people who cash in are the early adopters just like in a Pyramid scheme