Wrong chart to look at. This is the chart that matters:
Fair enough. So what do you see ? I see 1-1.5% daily growth. Unlike anyone else in this thread, I actually ran the numbers and published the results, based on an assumption of
less than 1% daily growth and 3%/week growth deceleration, which is much faster than historically, and very unlikely given whats about to hit the market (hint: Neptune, AM gen 2, BFL and some others). In case you missed it, even in that scenario, the outcome wasnt exactly very good.
So why doesnt anyone show me a simulation that does yield a positive ROI and is remotely plausible?
The key question is how fast the network is slated to grow to prove ROI. Since it peaked in September, we've been on a very steady decline. Obviously, difficulty isn't going to go into the negative, but the market has been saturated heavily enough to where network increases are likely to follow BTC prices more than innovations in chip development, since everyone is using 28-40nm technology now.
And that almost sounds reasonable, but its not. What you miss here, is that if PETA mining could be profitable with its off the shelve, 4.7 BTC/TH purchase costs and skyhigh electricity costs, then all the new hardware being offered today, and if nothing else, those private KnC/Bitfury/BFL/AM mines will be
many times more profitable So the market is not saturated, not by a long shot, and difficulty will keep going up as fast as these companies can produce hardware until even they are no longer clearly profitable at marginal production costs. We are at least an order of magnitude away from that.
Oh no, I agree that what PETA is offering cannot be sustained indefinitely. I am getting ready to list on Havelock with a much more sustainable offering. But I was just chiming in to state that the difficulty, long term, is going to play out differently than what we've dealt with for the past year.