As with your regular job, you have to continually grow your capabilities or the office will quickly outpace your salary, with mining you need to continually grow your equipment (read “hash rate”) or the pool will quickly outpace your rewards. If you sit with the same equipment you had last year at this time, you find yourself wondering if your electric bill will get paid. Slush has grown from 850 TH/s to topping 5 PH/s since February. The only way to keep your reward constant is to grow your mining farm at the same rate. If you had 10 GH/s capability in February, you would need 60 GH/s today just to get the same reward. The only way to grow your earnings is to outpace the pool. If you wanted ten times the February reward, today you would need 600 GH/s mining capability. It’s easy math, and it just requires you to justify the cash outlay for the equipment, but like gambling, you don’t want to put any more money into the venture than you can honestly afford. Fortunately, the equipment manufacturers are making the possibility of faster mining equipment more financially feasibly.