Quote from: goozman96 on October 05, 2014, 07:12:15 PM

How the difficulty is still going up, I don't understand.. If I had to pay for electricity, I wouldn't be mining right now. But I have free electricity. Cheesy

I will posit two examples for people to consider.

Using a single Antminer S2 in the example with BTC value of $300

Example 1:
At 13 cents a kW, the electricity cost of running an S2 per day is about $3.43 and at $300 per BTC you would be mining around about $4.42, the supply cost then represents about 77.6% of the potential mining cost.

It doesn't matter how many S2 miners you have, this % mining cost only varies if you pay for tech staff to manage a large facility and any repair costs. Small businesses, i.e. home miners, CANNOT compete with large businesses who can run close to break even.

Example 2:
A fictitious web hosting company turned mining operation as a tax write off. It doesn't matter what the miner/mining costs are, if a company has $$$ to write off, they can do so by adding a tonne of miners to their racks and just blast away. Noone would question the purchase of miners as to the tax department or auditors, they are just more 'servers'.

While running their facility at a loss, they also earn BTC by the truck loads in undeclared wallets. It would be illegal to do so in some countries, but I have a feeling this is part of what is going on here along with legit big farms running close to the line.