Agreed. I never once got a calculator out but simply did the math in my head after watching a few difficulty increases and then reading the forums and seeing the TH coming. I started paying close attention around 8 mil and now we are over 37 million and climbing faster. I had predicted 60 million by September - November assuming all machines shipped and I completely stopped following in late June early July since it appeared too flakey for me. Now there are so many more options I truly dont see why anyone would get involved until it settles down.
Yep. Given that the hashrate chart now has an almost vertical slope, the profitability calculation has an intolerable sensitivity to the x-axis time value. Any slight movement rightward on the curve, even measured in days, makes previous calculations moot, and ROI goes negative. It's worse than gambling: at least at a casino, the odds are against you but they're relatively stable in the time dimension, with no dependencies on other people's promises.
The only sure-fire way to make money in mining right now, is to build mining goods and services and offload the risk onto stupid people willing to preorder insanely time-sensitive products in an environment where broken promises and missed deadlines have been the norm. The sellers have no skin in the game whatsoever: in the best case they win, in the worst case they lose nothing. A brilliant business model if you can find enough lemmings to sign up willingly.
It is sad to see a community whose genesis block laments the asymmetric risk profile of legacy banking, falling all over themselves to gift the mining industry a free put option on every piece of equipment they produce.
Preorder = Prebailout. Simple as that.