I spent some time looking into mining about three weeks ago - with the proviso that my hardware would be free, since I run a 3D animation company that's in the process of transitioning to GPU-based rendering - and came to the conclusion that right now, it still ain't worth it.
To be fair, there's a bit of a conflict between the best rendering hardware - Nvidia, because of CUDA - and the best mining hardware - ATI. Obviously, I'd have been mining on NVidia. However, the numbers didn't even make much sense using ATI.
Bitcoin mining has been screwed because of the dedicated hardware, which has meant a flood of miners into Litecoin - which has proceeded to screw the Litecoin ecosystem too.
I shall keep an eye on the situation - I suspect there will be pockets of opportunity in the future. But right now, not so much.
Most people agree that if you believe in Bitcoin, the best way to invest is just to buy some coins and leave them in a safe place for a year or more. The economy is deflationary so if whole Bitcoin doesn't fail in near future, the price will eventually rise above the price at the moment you invested.
It's deflationary in the sense that with passing time each coin is worth more than before. There is some correlation with money supply, but deflation ultimately means: how much can you buy for a set amount of currency.
The inflation/deflation of the US dollar for instance is measured by statistics like the CPI, which boils down to how much consumer goods you can buy. If you can buy 10 peaces of bread this year for $10 but only 9 peaces of bred next year, you have inflation. If you can buy 11, you have deflation. How the dollar supply (number of existing dollars) changes has a correlation to this (i.e. it influences this), but it's not defining it.
I've a little ASIC device sitting in the corner, but it's more a mild curiosity than any actual income. I've made a lot more money reselling the devices than I have mining with then.
FPGA is still viable, the chips are fairly cheap and performance can be improved with better designs, but ASIC will absolutely crush it.
The good news is that getting your FPGA design taped out as an ASIC is actually not all that expensive, relatively speaking. Some will give you a few hundred samples for around $15K. Not cheap per-chip, but avoids the $250-500K setup fee you normally incur with most ASIC runs.
I mean, ok, you benefit the bitcoin community with it, still...
Not to mention the maintenance costs (assembling the rigs, wiring, parts that stop working, etc)
Since the future price of Bitcoin is unknown, at the end of the day you can not really decide if mining is profitable with maths.
I stopped mining when I generated less money than I spent for electricity (the gear had already been paid off). However, back then the exchange rate was maybe 5$. If I had known that it would be 100$ two years later, perhaps I could have mined longer.
http://reckoner.com.au/2013/07/my-three-months-as-a-litecoin...
The block reward, which halves every once in a while, eventually hitting 0 after all are mined
And then the transaction fees. Basically if I want to send a BTC to somebody, I send the coin to them, and also sign over a small extra amount as a transaction fee. A miner who solves a block (ie, a bundle of transactions) can send those fees anywhere they like (their own account).
So in a long-run situation, mining effort will balance out transaction fees to come to some sort of equilibrium.
That's the problem with his logic. Bitcoin's exchange rate has remained pretty much constant while the difficulty rate has increased 10x in the last 6 months.
