So from everything I've read, mining seems too good to be true. And in my experience, if something seems too good to be true, it is.

But I can't find the catch. I've been running my crappy laptop at about 60 Mhash/s for a while now with bitcoin.cz, and it seems I'm actually generating money. I'm generating less money than what I pay for electricity right now, but I'm literally making money out of goddamn thin air.

However, when I grab the stats from this bitcoin ASIC miner and put them in this simple calculator, I get a base income of nearly 10 bitcoins or 1000 USD per month. Which seems absurd, even before I've started factoring in the costs.

So when I looked at this thread, I expected to see some rather high costs that I didn't think of, but those don't seem to be there either. I can't find the wattage for that ASIC unit, but a 4,5 Ghash machine from the same company was marked at 4,5 W, so supposing the5 Gh machine grabs 5 W, I would spend... about 35 dollars if I run it for 10 000 hours. What. If I randomly grab percentages out of thin air and say that it will cost me 30% of my income for power, 20% will be lost on downtime, 10% will be lost on pool fees, conversion costs and other expenses and that the hash difficulty rises 10% per week, I would still earn enough to break even in the region of a month.

If I put my ASIC data into this calculator, it tells me I will break even in a week.

This can't be true, there would not be any point in selling the ASIC units if they break even in a week, you'd just make them and then use them yourself.

So where's the catch?