Quote from: PuertoLibre on April 29, 2013, 10:53:29 PM

Quote from: Bakemono on April 29, 2013, 10:47:10 PM

Quote from: Syke on April 29, 2013, 07:48:38 PM

Quote from: Scared on April 29, 2013, 06:32:33 PM

For a $149 investment it'll repay itself and make $1300 on top in one month of mining.

Think again. You paid about 23 BTC 10 months ago. You'll make .3 btc/day. Even if the difficulty doesn't skyrocket (which it will), you need more than 2 months to just break even. You aren't making any profit for a long time.

Scared is right to be happy because he invested 149$ in the bitcoin currency (through the jalapeno)
and his return will be 149+ $ (actually thousands of them).

Scared will be right to be happy that he invested in the bitcoin currency through the jalapeno
instead of directly buying bitcoins when his jalapeno will mine for him more than 23 BTC.

Will it?

23 BTC is now worth....3266.03226 USD (or about 22 jalepenos)

So...how about someone do some math on the difficulty going up with a constant period of adjustment. What will it take to get back the 23BTC?

I did some math on this when considering buying an ASICminer Blade (they just went for around 52 BTC per piece). The Blade is 10 GH/s, so to get the Jalapeño figures, just divide by 2-ish.

My calculations show that if difficulty rises 1% per day for the next 365 days, then at the end of those 365 days one will have mined 49.2 BTC (with a 10 GH/s Blade).
One would start out mining 0.5 BTC per day, and end up - after 365 days (under the above assumption) - mining only 0.0132 BTC per day.

The hash rate right now is around 93 TH/s. A 1% increase in hash rate per day would mean that the hash rate, at the end of those 365 days would be around 38 times what it is now, which would mean that on 2014-04-29 the hash rate will be 3504 TH/s.

The current 14-day average for the growth in network hash rate is around 1.2% per day (it has varied between 0.8% and 1.8% in the last two months). http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

Using the same figure (1% rise in hash rate per day) for this Jalapeño, it would take 167 days to mine 23 BTC. You'd start out mining 0.28 BTC per day (at difficulty 10,000,000), and end up (after the 167 days) mining 0.0526 BTC per day (at difficulty 52,933,877). After a year, you would have mined 27.5 BTC, and the difficulty would be 379,634,535.

But this assumes a constant rise in hash rate of 1% per day, so it really is just a thought experiment; no one knows how the hash rate will evolve.