Quote from: babaji.ca on December 21, 2013, 04:49:08 AM

Quote from: myxomop on December 21, 2013, 04:45:12 AM

Quote from: GarbageName on December 21, 2013, 04:20:58 AM

Its called speculation (or gambling). It is an addiction. We have banks, and markets set up to legalized gambling, with no underlying value. Welcome to the human race.

See the tulip bubble, housing bubble, etc...the asset can never go down! Until it does...

--GarbageName

Right. Still though, can anyone chime in with some calculations? If this miner will never mine as many bitcoins as were spent to buy this thing, what dies it matter if bitcon will jump to 10K per unit? You still lost bitcoins in the end??
There's gotta be a catch here.

It's simple; if that miner that cost you £2,800 only mines you 1 BTC before end of life and the value of 1 BTC rises to £20,000 sometime in the future, then it was worth all the effort.

And he is saying, why not buy 4 2/3 bitcoins at current price and make 20000 * 14/3?

You are right it doesn't make sense. Originally (and still with some scrypt and cpu coins) you could use off the shelf hardware that you might already have or could use anyway to do the mining. In some sense it was a way of using equipment, the general public arleady had, to secure a currency, the general public would use.

At this point; its just speculation, but even then it doesn't make sense. The idea with off shelf equipment is you can sell it back when you are done. A graphics card a year from now, is still a graphics card that you can sell and recoup some your initial costs. A bitcoin miner? Nope.

You might as well just buy the bitcoins, because the miner will be worth the same as the currency if it all goes down in a blaze of glory.

--GarbageName

PS No, you are right see my post.

(with reference to next post)