Quote from: stsbrad on March 19, 2014, 03:20:42 AM

What if they buy this and just let that mofo roll and go long term. Would they be stupid if in 2020 1BTC=$50,000 USD?

The most often cited argument against that is that it would have been more profitable to purchase BTC with fiat now rather than a miner. For a $600 investment you return $49,400. For $600 worth of usb block erupters (30 of them?) at 10GHS you'll "never" mine 1BTC, however you'll pay roughly $100/yr in electricity at 0.15/kwh and depending on the difficulty it is debatable whether "never" is actually true. At any rate, in 6 years of mining you'll have spent $600 in electricity which is what that 1BTC would have cost you in the first place, and you wouldn't have had the hassle of babysitting them. Oh, and I also left out the cost of running a computer or PI 24/7 because some people do that anyway, yadda yadda. The argument works without factoring it in.

Now if you have cheap/free electricity and you pay for your used miners with BTC and you make some calculations about the equipment's longevity and the rate of difficulty increases, you may find that you can return a profit in BTC, which is worth it.

People were willing to "waste" electricity on computing activities such as Distributed.NET, Prime95, SETI@home, Folding@home, etc when there was no chance of seeing a positive ROI. Mining has a far better ROI (positive or not) than any of those activities, and they were in no way small endeavors.