I'm in the process of buying a Modminer Quad, because
A) It fit's my price range
B) Super cool looking
C) It will still be profitable for a few more months
D) I have free electricity
I don't know if you really understand this, but do you know that you "might" make about 7 bitcoins over the course of those couple of months. Totally not worth it unless you only pay about $120 for it. Just Sayin'
I'm not mining for profit. I like the whole idea, and I'll be helping out the network. TBH, I haven't seen any proof of ASICs coming out, so who knows - it may be more than a few months. And it may be profitable since the price of BTC can increase.
You know the network difficulty is self-regulating, right? It doesn't need any "help". If there are less devices hashing, the network self-regulates and makes it easier to find blocks. If more miners pop up, the network makes it harder to find blocks. The only reason to mine is to MAKE MONEY.
If you want to really help, do one of those protein folding programs that help cure cancer. That will make a real difference in the world.
Nice sarcasm. I also think it's pretty whack that you're trying to stray people away from mining. Right now, with the current difficulty, a Modminer Quad will produce ~4
BTC per month (
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator). According to blockexplorer, the next estimated difficulty isn't changing too much to affect results (
http://blockexplorer.com/q/estimate). Assuming this stays the same, because ASICs aren't shipped, the price of BTCby somewill be an estimated $30 by March 2013 (
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=136146.0). Finally, people are selling Modminer Quads for around $325, so a breakeven would be around three/fourth months. ASICs have been delayed for several months and still no proof is out there these products exist (or perform what they're advertising). So it's completely feasible for me to purchase a MMQ.