Thank you for your responses.

I feel I should clarify, though -- I am not calling everyone who claims $1.XX per BTC a liar.
I know there are miners Up North, those with cheaper electricity, and even (gasp!) those who have a more efficient setup than me. 

Nevertheless, I believe that quite a few who make that claim might be simply mistaken, from lack of knowledge of how to do proper accounting of their costs.

But I would point out that sometimes you can lose a few W of efficiency, while saving quite a bit on hardware costs. If per-Watt efficiency were everything, we'd all be using FPGAs right now.

You think illegality would stop Wal-mart? They make so much money they OWN the government. They can buy however many politicians they want, local or federal.
And those studies might have been paid for by Wal-mart.

You need to watch the video I did about Wal-mart -- very eye-opening.

I thought of that -- the huge guys, who perhaps made lots of money early on, could have deep enough pockets to operate at a loss until most people give up.

Just like Wal-mart sells things under cost for a couple years, making a negative return for as long as necessary, until all the mom & pop appliance stores, hardware stores, grocery stores go out of business. Then, when they're the only option for the people in the town, they jack up their prices and make back everything they lost, and profit every year after that. (This is absolutely true, sad to say).

The only difference is, it's easier to fire up a miner than to start a mom & pop store. In my analogy, once Wal-mart is in "let's profit" mode and jacks up their prices, imagine if people could start a mom & pop store in a couple hours? They could undercut Wal-mart and mess up their plans.

So I don't know if that is really a concern. Maybe it will just work on "most" people, instead of all?

I've read several posts in the past week (in the "Shutdown point" thread, etc.) where people quoted a mining cost of $1.XX. I have my doubts.
For one thing, the individuals seemed to use a complex mathematical formula, which seems very prone to error.  I prefer to take last month's electric bill, subtract last years' amount due (for the same month), and divide that amount by 30 to get my daily cost. That seems a bit safer, no?  It counts everything from CPU cost to PSU inefficiency, extra AC, fans, the whole nine yards.

Maybe if you keep your PCs in a garage and you live far enough north where it never goes above 60 during the day you could throttle down your onboard fans, turn off all exterior fans, and get below $2. But when you keep mining rigs in your house, and you keep the temp around 70 (=pleasant for human habitation), then Texans and Alaskans are in the same boat. I find that I still need a small desk fan pointed between the cards, on low at least, to keep the top card below 84 degrees. For me, anything over 82 is the red zone. I don't want to damage my cards (remember that when you see my cards up for sale in the Goods sub-forum!  )

I have most of my fans (intake, exhaust) turned off now -- in Texas we finally got Fall. But I'm still using around 90 kWh a day for my 6 GH/s. That's $7.92 for the approx. 3.5 BTC a day I earn. That comes out to $2.26 a BTC. As I type, the current price for BTC is $2.22.

Yes, I'm not in the coolest part of the country, but some Fall weather came in yesterday and the high is 74 today with a low of 43. And while my electricity isn't the cheapest in the country, it's pretty decent at 8.8 cents.

But I'm not at the low end of efficiency, either, as my cards are all 58XX series. True, I have no more than 3 in a machine... but I am using 80+ bronze PSUs, AMD II (dual core) CPUs, 2 GB RAM sticks, and 1 machine runs off a USB drive.

If anything, I'd say my setup is pretty average.

Here's what I don't get:
Estimated 1386207 in 1292 blks
Network total   11.314 Thash/s
Blocks/hour      6.46 / 557 s

And considering that a good chunk of the network is mining on Deepbit, BTCguild, and other NON-MERGED-MINING venues, they are only earning BTC. So how can so many people be earning money (or even breaking even) at the moment?

Remember, there are Mt. Gox fees when you sell the BTC and unless you want to buy Alpaca socks with your earnings, you have to pay a middleman 10% to turn them into gift cards, etc. (I guess you could Dwolla transfer, but then you leave a paper trail.) So we're getting darn close to "below cost" for many people.

Deepbit doesn't seem to be very perky either... so another DDoS on Slush & Deepbit?

While BTC is a whopping $2.23?

Not a good day for BTC.

You know, $2.23 is below my shutdown point. My electricity is 8.8 cents per kWh.
Only the NMC being mined bring me up and slightly over cost.

Just remember --

Wherever there is greed, there will be scams.
That is, people willing to play off that greed to rip people off.

Scams can't operate without greed, or a similarly pressing need.

Right now, there are a lot of people still into bitcoin mining, that wish they could have a low-wattage solution so they could weather whatever BTC price storms occur -- something that will ensure that they'll be the last man standing, no matter what.

I woke up today, thinking the price of BTC was 2.50 -- of course, the first thing I did was visit Mt. Gox! 
This is one dream I wish hadn't come true.

Like many guys here, I get busy from time to time, and just don't have much time to post. Also, once you've posted for a while you've experienced just about everything (at least it seems) and so you feel like you'd be repeating yourself.

I was thinking about Bitcoin price today, pondering the Bitcoin economy (including "how much money is entering the system each day?"), price vs. difficulty, etc. but I haven't reached any conclusions or inspirations to post anything.

Except for this:
The recent release of merged mining is going to have the effect of inflating the # of Bitcoins beyond the usual expansion rate. (Like any alternate blockchain, that is.) You're basically creating more stores of value, chasing the same amount of $$$ coming into the system each day. That's why I wasn't surprised to see a large drop. Basically the "bonus NMC" -- which we were all so happy to treat as a bonus, and for a while they are -- are being baked into the price right now. That is to say, in a few days you won't be able to make a small profit (or break even) WITHOUT the extra NMC income.

The constant erosion of profit continues.  I think if selling video cards were easier, there'd be a much larger drop in hashrate these days
And then there's human psychology. One you've set it all up, there's not as much incentive to quit -- after all, you've invested all that time, right?

It's getting harder and harder to make a buck though...

Hey everyone --
Slush's website is down for planned maintenance -- does that mean NMC payout coming soon?

That's a smart move -- imagine if everyone knew Slush's routine -- when he's gone for a while, what day he likes to run household errands, when he's unconscious (asleep) for 8 hours, etc.

I, personally, like to keep my calculations "honest" -- after all, I wouldn't want to pretend my costs were lower than they were, and just "believe" I was making money.

Wouldn't that be stupid -- be making money in my own mind, but losing money in my actual bank account?

I wonder what "cryptographic hashing node" he was participating in...

From Craigslist:

I am selling three desktop PC's I built myself. These computers are only six months old. They were built for a cryptographic hashing node I set up in my apartment.
They have top of the line AMD/ATI graphics cards which are optimized for integer operations and ideal for security hashing. They will make excellent gaming PC's.

Here are the full specs:

Athon II X2 250 CPU
Sapphire Radeon 5850 GPU
2GB GSkill RAM
250GB Seagate HD
Gigabyte MA78LMT-S2 Motherboard
Thermaltake V3 Black Edition Case
Raidmax 630 watt Power Supply

The first photo shows all the parts exactly that went into these machines. Second photo is a close-up of one of the 5850's. These are really nice cards built under license by Sapphire. Best I have seen.
The third photo is a close-up of the CPU in box. It's a dual core Athlon series by AMD, one of the most popular and reliable CPUs for gaming. Last photo shows all three assembled PC's.

I am selling three of these! If you want more than one let me know.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

These machines do NOT have optical drives. Due to the ease of USB OS installs and direct-to-drive downloads I have not been putting optical drives into my new machines. If you have an old computer you are replacing and want the optical drive from it moved to one of these I will be happy to install it for you. Second, these computers are presently running Ubuntu Linux. Once again, if you own a copy of Windows and would like it installed I would be happy to do it for you.

That's all. Please email if you have any questions. Also, I am available to build other custom computers to your specifications. If interested, email me and we can figure out what will suit your needs.

Thank you.

I0coin is dead. It had no redeeming features over and above Bitcoin -- in fact it had plenty of disadvantages.

It was a pathetic attempt at a fork -- it was never more than a pump & dump. Its day is done.

I don't know; I think some people mention it as if they get "free electricity" due to their own cunning, intelligence, or courage. It's ridiculous when you think about it.

Either they live with mom & dad, they're renting, or they happen to be in college.

They half imply that they're somehow more awesome because they had enough confidence in themselves to go ahead and call the electric company and insist on being switched to the "free plan", which most of us have insufficient manhood to do 

Regarding botnets GPU mining on the sly --

As someone pointed out, that's very difficult as many people would wonder why their office is suddenly 10 degrees hotter than it was last week, with the same outside temperature and/or household climate control settings.

"Last week, my A/C was set at 78 and my office was comfortable. Now it's too hot in there."

Don't you suppose some people would notice their graphics card spinning up its fan a LOT more than usual (which is usually never, unless you're playing a game).

Even CPU mining could be noticeable, as many CPU fans only spin up when the CPU is getting hot from 100% type work.

When PCs start grinding to a halt, the desktop graphics start lagging, etc. that's when people take their PC to the local PC doctor, or they wipe their machine.

BotnetPopulation = BotnetPopulation - 1


P.S. We had this discussion months ago, back in the glory days when BTC were still $18 or more each. Remember -- botnets have a monetary value for their owners. Now that a Bitcoin brings in a lousy $5, it's even less economically worth it to risk giving up an infected PC.

Just be careful -- I bought a used MSI motherboard with an Opteron CPU and 2 PCI-E slots, but they didn't work with most modern video cards! Turned out they were PCI-E 1.1 instead of 2.0, and this particular mobo had problems with certain video cards -- such as ATI 5XXX and 6XXX series cards, that's all...

I spent way too much on that mobo. That experience completely soured me on buying cheap "older" mobos with PCI-E slots.

On the other hand, I got some old Dell mobos for $10 each that have (1) PCI-E slot -- I'm using one of those at the moment, but I used to have 2 of them set up.
The stupid things have (1) PCI slot as well, but when you have a card in the PCI-E slot it covers up the PCI slot! So I can't even use the PCI slot.

That sounds pretty serious.

I think Mt. Gox is running some kind of scam.

Why wouldn't they want people to withdraw BTC from their "system"? Is it some kind of attempt to dissuade you to "leave the casino" so they can make more money off you?

This last post is very troubling. Why would they IGNORE the requests of someone who actually jumped through their hoops -- a good customer by all appearances?

Maybe that was true once, but not anymore.

I just asked Mt Gox about it, and they said I need a photo ID *and* a copy of my last electric bill, just to be able to withdraw $1000 from my own account (instead of $480, which they'll let me do without ANY proof of who I am)

Ridiculous, since my account isn't under any suspicion.

They'll let me sell all those BTC and withdraw $1000 without any proof -- but if I want to deal in Bitcoin? Forget it. It will take TWO days, not just one.

How stupid is that? Mt. Gox is discouraging use of Bitcoin!

As a matter of principle, I would never pay anything extra -- even $10 over the normal registration price -- for a domain name from one of those waste-of-oxygen domain squatters.
They need to go get a real job and stop leeching off humanity.

If people would stop "feeding" them they'd stop real quick.

No, really it's not.

I verified my Paypal account by having them call my house and I typed in a few digits on my phone. Or they deposited 0.0X in my bank account and I typed in what the amount was. That's much more convenient.

And I'm not asking for hourly updates to the withdrawal limit. How about they just change it manually when an obvious sea change has happened?

If they can't easily change the default (once a year!), then they need to question the competence of their employees -- particularly their IT department. I could do a job like that in a few minutes.