Yep. I'll lay down the timeline for you since it's hard to imagine how badly I've played these hands of poker. The mining calculators all (most) account for a future decline in the profitability of mining, but "0.61 per year" apparently can't accurately characterize how quickly the difficulty has ballooned and how much you need to upgrade your hardware to keep up the pace.
I started with nothing but the computer on my back. I learned about bitcoin, started CPU mining when they were worth pennies. Accumulated 220 bitcoins through solo mining when blocks were worth 50 coins and learned to trade them at exchanges.
I bought and sold enough times that I was willing to add $50 to the mix. I made some bad trades and cashed out my $50 anyway in spite of the bad trades as $300, then bought in for $50 again.
Eventually I had 22BTC and the price was about $12.50. BFL was making their announcements about "shipping soon" again and I decided to take a risk and lay out $300 worth of bitcoins in mining equipment. I never paid $312. In fact I had already walked away with $300 separately.
Time passes. The price of a bitcoin approaches $300. I kick myself; I could have paid off all my student loans.
Time passes. The price of bitcoin is back around $115. It's getting harder to mine. I can't get back my 22BTC (or even close) with the GPU miner I'm using now. The community started to express doubt that BFL customers will get what they bargained for, as shipping deadlines continue to slip.
I keep my eye on the build queue and realize I'm next. I pay $200 (USD) to get 30% faster miners. At this point my GPU output is next to nothing. I'm making $6 twice a month... once a month.
Jalapenos arrive a few days ago. I plug them in (eventually) and I'm now mining 0.12 per day. I should have my $512 in about 43 days at the current difficulty. Next difficulty is estimated to be x1.32 on September 4, much sooner than that. I may never make back my $512 if this pace keeps up. Hopefully the exchange rates can keep pace with the difficulty.
At a minimum I should have made back my BTC investment in USD if the whole market does not go bust before then. Maybe it's 80 days. I still started with nothing and never risked more than $50, except for "play money."
It's all shoulda coulda "would have been" but you can see that 220 or even 22BTC is again well out of my reach.
Ah I see, it's missed possible returns, like RIAA 'losses' because of piracy ;). In investing you learn not to kick yourself about that kind of stuff. A guy a met at a conference told a story how he could of been a millionaire with GPU BTC mining if he kept the BTC vs selling. Instead he just got about the equivalent of $30k because he was justifiably paranoid. He is definitely kicking himself there. Told him he should of done the %25 speculation / %75 cash out ratio to ease his fears but still get a potential upside.
Yeah, I'm not one of those wankers who blames BFL because they said "two months or more" and then "or more" turned out to be quite a bit more. I'm really quite impressed with the pace of ASIC development, even if my own product shipped so late I may never make a return, there were people who ordered their items 7 months ahead of me who spent more and aren't getting it yet.
I'll be happy for BFL when they release the Monarch line. It's still pretty easy for me to be not bitter when I'm at least breaking even.
I started with nothing but the computer on my back. I learned about bitcoin, started CPU mining when they were worth pennies. Accumulated 220 bitcoins through solo mining when blocks were worth 50 coins and learned to trade them at exchanges.
I bought and sold enough times that I was willing to add $50 to the mix. I made some bad trades and cashed out my $50 anyway in spite of the bad trades as $300, then bought in for $50 again.
Eventually I had 22BTC and the price was about $12.50. BFL was making their announcements about "shipping soon" again and I decided to take a risk and lay out $300 worth of bitcoins in mining equipment. I never paid $312. In fact I had already walked away with $300 separately.
Time passes. The price of a bitcoin approaches $300. I kick myself; I could have paid off all my student loans.
Time passes. The price of bitcoin is back around $115. It's getting harder to mine. I can't get back my 22BTC (or even close) with the GPU miner I'm using now. The community started to express doubt that BFL customers will get what they bargained for, as shipping deadlines continue to slip.
I keep my eye on the build queue and realize I'm next. I pay $200 (USD) to get 30% faster miners. At this point my GPU output is next to nothing. I'm making $6 twice a month... once a month.
Jalapenos arrive a few days ago. I plug them in (eventually) and I'm now mining 0.12 per day. I should have my $512 in about 43 days at the current difficulty. Next difficulty is estimated to be x1.32 on September 4, much sooner than that. I may never make back my $512 if this pace keeps up. Hopefully the exchange rates can keep pace with the difficulty.
At a minimum I should have made back my BTC investment in USD if the whole market does not go bust before then. Maybe it's 80 days. I still started with nothing and never risked more than $50, except for "play money."
It's all shoulda coulda "would have been" but you can see that 220 or even 22BTC is again well out of my reach.