Quote from: D_Thomas on July 25, 2013, 09:33:28 PM

I'm pretty green to Bitcoins and mining but I think we had a window of opportunity that is now closed for mining for profit. Or better said, mining for profit much over the break even cost of the hardware.

For example, I don't believe there will ever be a day you will be able to buy from BFL (or any other vendor) a machine such as the Jalapeno for $249, that will generate $400 in BTC in a month. That's a 61% rate of return on your investment in 1 month! When banks at paying 1% on a CD, that makes zero sense. It would be same as Amazon selling $20 bills for $10 with free shipping. Basic supply and demand principle would kick in and drive up the price of the hardware to the point where you would have to pay an amount that would result in you only being able to make something close to a normal rate of return on your money. You are going to have a shortage, as in more people ordering than the company can ever supply, and a few lucky people reselling the products at a price so high that your rate of return will much lower and closer to what other traditional investments pay.

So none of this is making any sense at all to me. It makes zero sense that someone like BFL would sell any of their products at all. Anyone with capacity to build powerful miners should be mining with them, not selling them. Something fishy is going on.

I basically turned $100 into $3,000 over 10 months mining but it was pure luck. My used GPU that cost $100 mined 8 coins. Ordered a Jalapeno last year that cost me $249. It arrived and I sold it for over $2K. Now I can't find anything in stock that can be purchased that has even a remote chance to pay itself off, much less make a profit. I'd like to mine again but everything I explore seems like a loser to buy now.

No, mining will never be guaranteed money anymore. Too many people are in the game now.

People still buy from BFL because it's a gold rush. They think if they can get in now they can still make money. It's far too late. BFL sells instead of mines because they can make far more money selling hardware to miners than they can actually mining. If BFL actually suddenly shipped all 60,000+ pre-orders tomorrow the difficulty would skyrocket so high than none of those machines would ever make thier cost.

I hate to say this but you didn't make as much as you thought you did (if any at all) from your Jalapeno.
I bought 2 Jalapenos at $150 last October. At the time, BTC was worth $10. That means those Jalapense cost me 15 BTC each. I don't expect those Jalapenos will ever mine 15 BTC in their lives. I would have been far better off just buying BTC with my $300. I would have 30 BTC now worth about $3k.

You were smart to sell your Jalapenos for 20+ BTC. You would never have mined that much. But you still might have been better off buying BTC instead of a Jalapeno (depends on what the exchange rate was at the time).

I always look at mining costs in terms of BTC, because spending dollars on a miner is an opportunity cost of me not spending that money on buying BTC directly. You need to use the exchange rate at the time you pay for the miner and then think purely in BTC from then on.

If you look at it that way, pretty much every customer of BFL is LOSING money.