By my calculations:
BRONZE 1 GH/s contract - now starts in Sept
At current difficulty, 1 GH/s earns 0.0322 BTC/day. But as you know difficulty has been skyrocketing. Previously, on avg every 2 weeks difficulty increased 10%, the past difficulty (and looks like coming difficulty) have increased on the order of 20-25%!
If this trend continues, by the time the Sept contract starts (say 10 wks from now, or 5 difficulty adjustments of 20% each), 1 GH/s will only bring 0.0131 BTC/day. A year of such mining (again assuming 20% increase in difficulty every 2 weeks) would only net 0.91 BTC total. Since a 1 GH/s contract costs $150 currently, the price of a BTC would have to be $167/BTC to *break even*, let alone earn back a profit.
Even the best PLATINUM contract at 10 GH/s starting in Sept would only earn back 9.21 BTC at the end of a year (with assumptions above). But in this case, BTC would only have to be $103/BTC to break even.
For comparison, a BFL 5 GH/s ASIC costs $274, so to get the same 10 GH/s power you would only need to spend $548 vs $950 for the Platinum contract.
Your comparison to BFL falls short due to power usage , maintenance cost and baby sitting the gear .
Also your price is wrong. 2 units from are 548 plus shipping for 2 units is 34 so price is 582 not 548. Plus power used will be around 75 watts. So 1 year at 75 watts 24/7 is about 105 usd . Using my New Jersey price of 16 us cents a k-watt. Many people are far higher then 16 us cents a k watt.
So the one year cost of the 2 bfl's is about 687 usd at 16 cents a k-watt to 899 usd at 48 cents a k watt. With a lot of work . the platinum contract would be 950. with no work.
Bottom line is each method has its upside and its downside, BTW I have 4 bfl's on order and I have 1 contract with cloud hashing. Plus my soon to die GPU farm.
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To cloudhasher:
My contract was pending I was charged 717 for the 1 year contract on my cc. It was listed on your site as pending it appears to have vanished on your site. I can see you did an update on the site. I am going to post my experience with your site once a week or so right here on this thread publicly. So if you want to reply publicly as to why I dropped off your site please do. I realize that site updates do cause f' ups and that I am sure my contract will appear again on your website. Thanks in advance for your attention to this error.
Best Regards Phil