Bitcoin Forum

Looking at http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ I'm not seeing any signs of massive mining power outflux.

Many predicted a lot of miners would leave around $5, some quitting completely, some resorting to buying BTC at the lower prices.

It doesn't seem to me any of this is happening (yet?). The price has been around $5 for 2 days now.

Thoughts?

I don't know of anyone else, but even if BTC hit one dollar, I will still be mining, by the time I even get 20 BTC mined in one month, it'll be more than a dollar or more than 5 dollars.

I'm long, BTC :p

deepbit has dropped to 4800 mh/s...I think a lot of people will get out now that BTC is worth 4.xx.

I think its going to take a bit longer for most miners to start unplugging... the price fluctuates so wildly that many i think keep hope that by the time it matter the price will have come up again. 

Then you have the ones who will keep mining regardless of the price just because they like to and are fascinated by bitcoin. 

But you do see an effect for sure on deepbits hashrate.  I find it most noticeable there. They are down ~800GH/s from normal.

Gh/s...

To the OP:

They're not leaving in hordes because they want to hoard all the video cards...
(See the spelling difference?)

+1

And for the love of god, if you're not going to put significant values in the last couple digits, please use the next SI prefix up and call it 4.8 TH/s.

Not getting out. My miner just keeps crashing and it takes me a day or two to notice.

Ah, thanks. I'm not a native english speaker. Happy to learn ;)

Nope I am in fact adding in my very first device that can be considered a "rig" though at 600 mhash/s it is really nothing compared to those done by the rest.

It will take months for that to happen.

Firstly miners will think.. ..other miners will quit, so the price will rise. Secondly, it potentially doesn't affect them: just hoard whilst the price is low gambling on the price being higher in the future. It'll take months of low prices to kill mining..

..and then, theres people who have access to computers but don't pay the electricity bill. They will continue. I wonder how many are able to do that?

That's the key right there.  Most people will stick it out at least until the next power bill hits and maybe even for two bills, hoping to see a turnaround in price or drop in difficulty that will keep mining profitable.  There's definitely some people out there that will continue to mine regardless, but I bet some of the power goes dark after a while.  For example, I'm running 11 GH or so and it's costing about $500/month with a great .085 cents/kwh power rate.  If it gets unprofitable for me I'll still probably keep a GH or two running to help the network, but I can't afford to throw $400-$500 at it each month with no return for very long.

Out of curiosity, may I ask you why are you still mining even if buying bitcoin off the market costs less than the electricity needed to mine them? Should I assume that you don't pay for the electricity you use?

I'm personally safe till just over the $3.00 range as far as electricity goes. Have another dollar wiggle room before I even start to consider it at all.

I must be mining at a cheaper rate than 90% of the forum users because I'm still profitable at $3/coin at these difficulty levels. I'm not sure why any of you would stop.

power cost in germany, for example, is 0.21 €/kWh = 0.29 $/kWh. I bet you pay less.

Yeah, I'm sorry for those of you mining in Europe. It might be better to maybe pay for mining "leases" in the US?

You mean you're not one of those Folding @ Home guys, whose idea of fun is to spend their extra money on hardware to crunch numbers?  ::)

I'm not such a (what's the most derogatory word for geek or nerd?) that I'd spend even $20 on electricity for some silly distributed computing project.
I'd rather take my wife out to dinner or ANYTHING I can actually enjoy. I guess I have a life...

half the electric used for mining put into a more profitable venture. You can even recycle your parts lol look at the computer fan on the right lol

http://www.thcfarmer.com/forums/attachments/34705d1243233741t-sog-scrog-cabinet-grows-cab34.jpg.att

I would like to say this is a joke and I don't cultivate cannabis :D I took this picture from google images.

And then you have those with electric heating and winter coming on soon. No reason not to mine to heat the house...

Anyone mining for under the cost of electricity per bitcoin is basically making one bet, that the future value of the bitcoin will be worth more than it is today.  Is it a safe bet?  Absolutely not.  No matter what you read on these forums no one really knows if bitcoins will be worth $25, $10, $5 or $1 in a year's time.  A lot can happen to bitcoin and its periphery during that time (just recall the last 4 months!).

Five months ago the 'difficulty drives price' argument was popular on these forums.  We've seen that argument fail many times (just check bitcon's value in June and now, and compare difficulty).  The next argument for much higher values is a reduction in bitcoins per block sometime next year from 50 to 25.  Yet no one really knows if this will have any impact on price.  Difficulty has more than quadrupled in the last few months (equivalent to getting 12.5 BTC per block instead of 50 with the same difficulty) yet the price is a fraction of what it once was.

Miners are probably not leaving in hoards now because they're betting on higher prices.  My suggestion is if bitcoin's price remains well below $10 we won't see new miners, and if it stays around $5 only North Americans can afford to mine for a rather meager return.

I get electricity @ ~$.074/KWh, so I have no problem mining and keeping profitable for a long time (until we hit about $2/BTC at current difficulty). Difficulty decrease is pretty significant, too, however. Balances it out a bit. When BTC was over $20, the profits were utterly ridiculous for miners, and I knew I had to sell as much as I could because the price increase was unjustified. Now we're at a pretty reasonable profit rate -- still high, though, considering how little time it takes to maintain miners.

@Cluster2k I think people are betting on the future much more than you're assuming. We all knew BTC mining was becoming rapidly more difficult, so people were speculating and buying in, thinking the lower cost to "produce" BTC now would make it a good investment for when difficulty ramps up later. - And I think it's clear people were speculating based on how wildly volatile BTC was at the time. However, I think it eventually came clear to people buying in the hype that the cost to produce BTC even at a difficulty 5x what we're at now wouldn't justify how much they're paying. Now we're seeing people speculate again because of the strong downward trend in mining difficulty, I think, though the downward trend in price obviously has an enormous impact, too. People are getting nervous and selling, seeing the present trends and predicting a grim future. That's how stocks work, too, and people who trade against the news after the news' effect has peaked or dipped tend to see fantastic returns. It's rare for people to trade on fundamentals anymore, and instead we see a lot of chartists with self-fulfilling prophecies speculating. Some of us still have thousands in BTC who aren't willing to see another potential 50% drop in BTC value against gov't currencies, and the present trend is suggesting that's possible, so fickle people get out while they can. I'll be holding and mining, at least until we see what happens to price after the block reward halves.

Getting the fickle miners out of BTC may be good for the value of BTC long-term, I think. When the price drops for us in BTC long, we have no problem holding until demand increases. Less supply (all else assumed same) will result in a higher price. Upward trend encourages the masses to buy more, and that's when we can sell at a higher price, sticking the losses to the followers.

tl;dr - Sell high, buy low, fuck trends, trust fundamentals, never invest more than you're willing to lose and stay out of debt.

What strong downward trend? Maybe you're not talking about Bitcoin?

Yeah I agree, not sure where you think there's a downward trend?  Yeah, it's going down a bit from the peak, something to the tune of around 7%, but that's after almost a 700% jump in the months prior.

It's certainly very noticeable in terms of how much BTC I'm receiving/day (though I may be biased after expecting 20%+ less every time the difficulty shifts), and shows no sign of stopping right now. At any rate, it's the greatest downward trend ever in Bitcoin's history.

GPUs don't follow Moore's law.

Butterflies don't follow gravity.

I thought Moore's Law said something about 18-months, not 24-months.  

Either that or "anything that can go wrong will go wrong" or something like that.

People need to factor in that winter is coming in the Northern Hemisphere as well. Both European and US miners will be turning back on as there is no other spaceheaters with a return, except the aforementioned marijuana farm. I used to dump my grow exhaust into the house in winter, to my ladyfriend's chagrin (she doesn't partake). It kept things warm at no additional cost, but you don't run odor control like ozone (toxic) while you are blowing into your living space so the house tended to get a bit fragrant.

I know here in Los Angeles (on LADWP at least), electricity rates also drop beginning in September, almost halving my cost per kwhr. Thank god for public utilities. My friend on Edison (the private one) pay almost triple my rate and are only 15 miles away...

Do you mean potential hashing power? Because transistor count and hashing power are not directly correlated, as noted by the 2billion transistors of RV870 monstrously crushing fermis 3billion transistors in hashing power.

+1 Moore's law doesn't really apply to GPUs because for their different architecture nature than CPUs, Moore is more into RISC and CISC architectures.

Moore's law applies to all technology, not just CPU's and transistors. Of course it would apply to GPU's. Despite their different architecture... I am not familiar enough with it to argue with you on the specifics... but new generations of technology make development of subsequent, more powerful, technology possible. That is the essence of the way moores law should be understood. Not a precise relation to CPU speeds.


That's "Murphy's Law" you are thinking about. Anything that can potentially go wrong, WILL go wrong. Essentially. I love this law, as it is true on so many levels. I've spent way too much time thinking about it, probably because my own surname is Murphy and I am a narcissist.  :)

Growing coral is somewhere up in the mix as far as using electricity to make money.  There is a lot of coral that goes for $200 a frag -- some only approx. 1 square inch.  I'm about to get back into the saltwater reef hobby, but not to make money.  Just a little 1.5 gallon pico.

These all go for $200+ and are just the tip of the iceberg.  The disc they are glued on to is 1-2" in diameter.

http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c45/Stoneyscoral/CHE_4482.jpg
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c45/Stoneyscoral/CHE_4473.jpg
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c45/Stoneyscoral/CHE_4479.jpg
http://i24.photobucket.com/albums/c45/Stoneyscoral/CHE_4469.jpg

Nice. Where would I find out more about this? Is there a hobbyist site?
What is the connection with using electricity?

That is really cool.

A little squidoo entry I found on growing coral:

http://www.squidoo.com/coralgrowing

Yeah the temps already dropped to freezing last night here in Chicago  :o  I may need to pick up another 5970 to heat my whole apartment hehehe.....Actually that would be quite an expensive space heater!  My 5970 sure does love the cold weather though, they are VERY affected by ambient temps compared to other cards.  At full load they were mining at 62C (same as my 5830s and 6950s which was shocking to see) with a room temp of 58C.

Am I the only one that thinks it's funny that there's a SQUIDoo lens about CORAL?

Hilariously enough, I farm coral as well as the ganj. Nowhere near as profitable as growing dope, and takes a HELL of a lot more time and effort. You need a ton of space to make a profit. Reefer takes 3.5 months to mature, most of those coral frags were grown out for a year at least, with a lot of expensive consumables sustaining them, not to mention having to procure the original genetics for highway robbery prices.

The thing is both require effort, mining does not.

randy, is that you from reefcentral.com ?

blowing me up, holmes?

The funny thing is, that could be the name of a weed site, or a coral site.

I should have known it was you! Mr Chemist sir. Why am I not surprised to see you in bitcoin land.

There, I know what I am talking about. Here, I just be trollin'.

I guess I am not the only one looking to run my electric bill even higher...hehe.

Having a bunch of miners is a good front for other power consumption. It's unlikely they'll get out the meter and verify how much the rigs really use.

As long as you pay your bill, you can pull as much power as your breaker allows in LA and no one will come knocking on your door. Probably not the same in the dirty south, but here, you don't need cover, particularly if you aren't committing a crime. I got a condition, I tell you!

The connection with electricity is that it takes extreme amounts of light to grow out coral.  And it grows very slow.  I dunno, just reminds me of bitcoins.
reefcentral, nano-reef, and reefaddicts are the main sites I troll.
I wouldn't recommend getting into the saltwater reef hobby.  It's a very hard thing to do.  I had anxiety attacks over my 50g, but I'm going to try again with a pico and maybe step it up to a nano like how I started.

Well the connection to using a lot of power is changing with LEDs now days. Most of us still run metal halide or T5. I have a 6 bulb T5 setup
over my tank. And that is small tank too.

Some coral grows slow. Some are like weeds. No one will pay a lot of money for weeds. A lot of us give it away. It is also very very trendy.

reefcentral.com is the best place to go for a wide array of reading via searches.

I also would not recommend getting into salt water coral tanks (just fish are pretty easy though) without 2-3 months of research to
realize what a money pit you are getting into.  Think 1000-2000 dollars to setup a small tank and do it right for coral.

and then once set up you bug randy with really boring questions about alkalinity and lowering phosphate. heh.

No no no. You've got me confused with Randy Holmes-Farley. He's the chemistry guru. I am Randy Folds on ReefCentral...but I am a marine biologist and own an aquarium service, so I like to think I know a fair amount about coral propagation.

I've got a 26W PAR38 LED that throws out insane PAR.  LED's are the way to go if you can stomach the initial cost.

DOH. Sorry about that.
Still, nice to see reefcentral members around bitcoin!

I'm mining at a loss at the moment, but I still mine because my computer acts as a nice heater. Unfortunately summer is just a couple of months away so I'll have to give up mining then unless there is a dramatic increase in the value of BTC to justify the cost of running the rig + air con.

I'm mining and my cutoff for my server at the current difficulty is at $3.99. I'll actually mine a little below that, but at that point, I might as well be saving the electricity and buying btc directly. At a certain point, I would end up selling the cards.

I like it... Bitcoin farm as a power consumption cover for ganga farming, nice :)

no no no, be gone ganga demon, with your bad bad bad influence !!
:)

Hi,



Wow !!! I get energy @ 0.15 € / KWh and  this is in a industrial facility where I have to pay an extra for the rent space.
Actuall cost is around the owner pays is around 0.09€ KWh during peak hours and 0.06 KWh at night.
With the renting of the space my costs rise to 0.15€ KWh.

Can tell us where do you get those prices ???
If not in public can you at least pm me ?


Regards.

lol looks like I've got some people thinking :D Funny how a random post can spark such a random convo lol !! Loving the coral grows they look awesome !! I'm in no way a ganja farmer but I have roots in the hydroponics industry and worked in a hydroponics store for about five years ;)

Do you guys using the LED lamps rate them ? I sort of followed them back in 2005/6 when they were starting to appear on the market. The main problems they had was cooling and being LED apparently they tend to be a bit monochromatic ? I attended the hydro expo this year and saw some interesting designs though due to come out on the market this year :D Water cooled LED systems was one impressive display. I also like the look of these sulfur plasma lighting kits. I saw two being offered to retailers this year, one was pretty poor and one looked awesome !!

The bad one ran really hot and the guy selling the thing just didn't seem to know what he was talking about. The better designed one looked much more tidy, and lots cooler. Trouble is apparently the lack the red light needed to flower cannabis :D

LED lamps:

too expensive, price will come down.
many are poorly designed and lack of customization options, that is why DIY is still popular.
pretty darn butt ugly hanging above a tank in many cases compared to ATI T5 for example.
buying now means you are stuck with a model that may very well be improved in many ways in the next 1-3 years.
resale value will be poor as price comes down leaving you with undesirable older model.

but that is just my opinion. i still prefer ATI kits and bulbs. proven track record and stylish.
eventually i will go LED in the future.

I tend to agree with this assessment. LEDs on the whole, aren't there yet, especially for marijuana. I have never seen a halfway decent bud flowered out of LED, but they're fine for cloning and small scale vegging, especially if you are in a tight space.

Plasma lights might fly for ganj, but their spectral output is totally wrong for aquaria. I am curious to see where that technology leads, cause it has some serious potential.

Yep...too expensive...a few years ago I looked into commercially building some using Cree 1W LED's (blue and red).  The main problem is that the LED's are like $3+/bulb and you need about 100 to make a 400W equivalent. 

Basically, the main benefit of the LED's is that you are only creating the spectrum that the plants use...they appear green because they reflect the green light, so the solution is to not produce the green spectrum at all.  A properly tuned LED system should make the plants appear close to black (right?).  Also, you can put them a lot closer to your plants than HID/HPS.

The directional nature of LED lighting and low power usage per lumen is another huge benefit...I would only use them if power consumption, space, bulb life or heat was a major concern.

If I were to do anything in the indoor horticulture field I would probably use a combination of the increased blue/red spectrum HID's to get a gain in the "useful" spectrum.

I have heard good things about the T5's.

And what is that number-crunching going to? I consider it a donation to charity.

More like donating to science at best. If you really want to donate to charity, find someone LOCAL who needs the money and help them out. Charity from-a-distance is like government from-a-distance: fraught with waste. Charity is best done at home.

Anyhow, the chance of "donating $20 to science via distributed computing" doing any actual good is pretty slim. You'd be better off donating the $20 to some cause you believe in -- a scientific foundation if you prefer.

There's a lot of overhead in distributed computing projects, and only certain problems can be broken down into segments where reliability and resiliency aren't important. Remember, any piece of the puzzle can go "poof" if the person with that slice decides to quit. So the pieces of the puzzle can't depend on each other too much.

Many number-crunching scenarios could never be written for a distributed computing platform. Too much memory is required, the calculation can't be easily split up, etc.

I'm mining at a loss. I don't do it to make money, bitcoin will do that on its own... eventually. I mine in protest to the derivative-based (formerly fractional reserve) global banking system.

It would be more helpful if you bought the coins instead. Then miners with cheaper electricity could add more hashing power than you can for the same amount.

I think that your thinking isn't right. I think that if the majority of the miners thought as cbeast, Bitcoin would have been a success right now. More people like him is needed. He and others that think like him doesn't need to mine with very expensive rigs, but lets say if everyone with cbeast thinking mined with 0,2-2 Ghash/s Bitcoin no matter what price in fiat currency, Bitcoin would have build a very strong foundation. This is what Bitcoin is all about, not greedy miners that want fiat currency asap, and are selling at the exchanges as soon as they can. I am telling you, the way to kill the fiat lovers is by doing what they are doing to the Bitcoin Economy, make them make less in fiat/USD. The good part is that Bitcoin is in a high inflation environment so this is plausible. Just sell wait for the inflation to kick in and buy back more cheaper bitcoins. By doing this you have also f***ed the fiat lovers.

If money isn't an issue and helping Bitcoin is, then the way to do it is by solo mining. That way you add another node to the network and help it become less centralized. Just mining for a pool only adds your hashing power to an existing node - which isn't really of any strategic benefit, except making more steady income.

The fact that there are only about 3-4 big pools indicates that miners are mostly going for the money and not the concept of supporting distributed accounting. Decentralization is probably the most interesting aspect of Bitcoin and yet the least supported in actuality.

strangely enough the changes to solidcoin may facilitate this.... interesting

You are of course free to think whatever you like, but this and your negative attitude to greed is the same as saying that market economy is a bad idea. You would basically rather get less hashing power than give money to those greedy capitalists mining for profit.

I agree with you. I really don't get why profit is looked down upon so harshly. Fucking A, man...everyone wants to get rich. The market will react to such, and everything will work itself out in the end.

Protein folding is something that can be distributed though, and it produces real results (http://folding.stanford.edu/English/Papers). A no-hassle, $20 a month donation to a distributed computing science project is IMO a worthy cause. Due to the waste and expense of distributed supercomputing your $240 a year only buys you a fraction of a letter in one of those papers, but nobody can undo the science that has been done.

I thought the graphs I saw for the plasma lights looked great.  You could even change the spectrum by dimming it.  So far I've only seen one person use it on an aquarium and they never reported back as to growth, etc.  I know they use plasma on public aquariums, but I'm assuming those are fish only displays.  I really want to see where plasma goes too.  I've seen enough LED setups that just don't look natural due to multiple point sources creating funky shimmering colors.

I don't buy that unless you just recently started mining. By dollar cost averaging your cost per BTC is not what it cost today but what your average is since you started mining. Any miner from months back would have to be ahead and even more so if they sold some house money when the price spiked.

Yeah, you can pay for a 2000w plasma light, run it at 25%, and have yourself a $4000 metal halide that you could have gotten for $150.

None of the major public aquariums use plasma on their large displays, to my knowledge. Maybe they run some as an experiment, but they don't offer any real electrical savings at this point. Steinhart is one of the leading research aquariums in the world and they use only 1000w MHs in their 200,000 gallon reef display and grow 'high-light' SPS corals down to about 15' depth.

I agree that LEDs look like a friggin epileptic seizure waiting to happen. I will stick with halides or T5s for the time being.

your wife was in the room with you when you typed that right? hahahhaha

Nah -- taking my wife out to dinner involves A) quiet time with my wife away from the kids, B) good food, and C) improved mood for both my wife AND myself. 
So what's not to like about that?

I just don't see the benefit of spending electricity on something of dubious value. Scientists have access to all sorts of computers, including clusters of off-the-shelf PCs connected by ETHERNET, as well as actual supercomputers. They don't need my $20 in wasted electricity per month. Besides, I'm firmly convinced that cancer has been cured several times over. They just won't let us have the cure, since chemotherapy is so profitable. And let's not forget that the Georgia Guidestones call for a world population of only 500 million people -- curing a killer like cancer would be counter-productive to that goal.

Long story short -- I'm not a sucker. They don't need my computer, or my electricity.

i was just joking. :)

If you search around the forums a bit you can find all sorts of stories of relationships ended or stressed out because of Bitcoin. As a married man my self I find that sort of thing funny. Sorry! :)

That's kinda silly if you ask me.  If people want to donate their electricity/power towards whatever project they want, be it SETI, Folding, etc., what is wrong with that'?  It's no different than someone wanting to send a donation into the ASPCA or Red Cross, or sticking a few bucks into a donation box.  People donating their electricity/processing power do help a lot of these projects that would never be able to analyze the data or crunch the numbers that they have with their budgets.

If that's not for you...it's all good, and it's awesome that you get enjoyment out of spending your money elsewhere, but don't knock these projects as 'dubious projects' just because you don't think it's worth your money.

And please don't go off on some conspiracy theory tangent that all this is just some plan of government/corporation X.  I have a hard enough time reading through all your "BITCOIN IS DOOMED!" posts as it is ;)

The downside, once a major cure is found from one the results that thousands of people put their computer to work on there will be some big pharma outfit come in, patent the drug or process and then turn around and charge those same helping hands a 5000 percent markup for access to the cure.

After catching up on this thread, I stumbled on this news story, seems fitting to post it into the discussion.

http://www.gameinformer.com/b/news/archive/2011/09/19/foldit-users-solve-baffling-problem.aspx

Yeah, us gamers sure are awesome ;D

Even if a cure is found, it doesn't mean that there isn't stuff left to discover. Besides, Folding@Home is about protein folding, not curing cancer.

Knowing how certain proteins act could in fact lead to a cure or more directed treatments. As with all new treatments however if they cannot be made into a profit center you will never see them come to market. Case in point there are several totally natural treatments that have shown to be very positive in the treatment of cancer which you won't even find current trials on because no big pharma will back those trials because there is no potential patent they will be able to enforce.

You have no idea how drug development works. I have spent the last 8 years throwing myself at a prostate cancer vaccine synthesized from a marine snail's blood. We won't hand it over to bayer to be quashed, and so we are all going broke floating it as far as we can. You won't find it on current trials, but it has been into trials on four occasions now. There is most definitely an enforceable patent. 'Big Pharma' wants it bad.

Once again...protein folding is about protein interaction. Yes, that information can help lead to a cure, but to suggest it IS the cure is just foolish. Fuckin' Biochemistry...how does it work?

First off I don't really feel like being insulted by somebody who doesn't know one thing about me. Second off I have dug into multiple "cures" for certain types of cancer that have shown great promise in the lab and even results in limited trials but that research is dead in the water because of no funding by big pharma into more natural cures. I have spoke with the researchers themselves and asked about further trials and was point blank told that any further trials on a larger group would not happen by them because of the lack of funding, their words are below since this was just a few weeks back:

" there is no patent on it. This means that if some company spent millions on clinical trials, anyone else could come in and sell it cheaper because they had no patent costs to recoup.

A change in the law is needed so that if some company performs clinical trials, they should be able to obtain an exclusive right to sell. Would you go into business to lose money, no matter if you helped people?"

As to protein folding thank you for admitting I was correct.

http://images.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/10133760.jpg

Fella, I wasn't trying to insult you. I was just pointing out that curing cancer is just a small implication of discerning protein interactions. I am currently pouring way too much of my time and money into a business where I am losing it all and have very little prospect to recover it...yet I am still here, plucking limpets out of the ocean and purifying their blood, running my diagnostics, and praying that in the end, I don't just end up bankrupt and empty-handed.











But hey, I might cure cancer. What are you up to today?

Most miners made a medium-term or long-term investment in hardware.  As with the housing market, you won't see big-time miners quit just because the price drops for a couple of weeks, or even months.  They're invested long-term and have absolutely no choice but to continue mining to pay off their hardware investment.

You will see the little guy with a card or two in his spare computer quit, or just mine out of curiosity for a couple of weeks and then stop.  I'm one of those guys who got bored after having mined a few coins.  I quit mining also because of how much pools rip you off - all of the associated third parties surrounding bitcoin give this currency a crap name.

-Foo OUT!

Thought these two posts were a little at odds with each other: 8 years going broke on prostrate cancer and something else that made money. 

Are they at odds? How so? Worked on, not owned, my good sir. A gigantic difference, indeed.

ok, difference noted.

Some miners leave in hordes to play WoW.

http://besthordelevelingguide.info/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/world-of-warcraft-325x150.jpg

If the BTC price stays this low for long enough, I'll be leaving for WoW as well. For the horde!

Dunno about that. I paid off my hardware costs within a few weeks, factoring in liquidation value of the gfx cards alone. Assuming no liquidation value, my hardware was paid off in full (after electricity costs) within a few months. Then again, I started near the beginning of this year when things just started to really pick up and get ridiculous. Getting in to mining now would be a pretty ballsy (and probably pretty dumb) move when you could simply buy and hold BTC if you're simply interested in making a gamble. Best move now, I believe, would definitely be to sell for BTC. We're in a great time now where BTC's about to have "inflation" halved within a few months at a time where productive use of BTC (that is, for commercial and industrial use) is probably at an all-time high.

bitcoin mining is like buying the coin in small junks and paying for the coin via hardware cost and electricity bills. For some reason, most people have really hard time understanding this simple concept. Your coins are not free even when you are low life loser and a thief, stealing power from your mom so you can jerk off next  to your "rig".
At those prices and difficulty it has become pointless to mine probably in most of the EU. Lest hope the price of the btc soars or diff drops to 800K or less.

Unplug your rigs and save the planet :)

Mining incentive will halve to 25 BTC at the beginning of 2013, not in a few months. If it would halve in the beginning of 2012, I speculate we'd already see a lot less supply on the currency markets.

Commercial and industrial use being at an all time high? That is wild speculation. En contraire, I think "productive use", as you put it, is very low now compared to what we might see next year or 2013.

Your point about the best thing to do for a miner being to sell his rig for BTC is true in my mind.

It will halve by December 6, 2012 based on a block every ten minutes. Based on the mean speed of churning out blocks, it will halve by November 25, 2012. So not the beginning of 2013, but still there isn't too much reason to worry about the halving.

I am not really worried because my calculations show that I will never get back the value of my investments in the rig :), already put as sunken costs .  Of course unless the bitcoin jumps in value tremendously.

This will happen, mark my words ;)

*marks them*