Right now, today, if you have no mining gear and a big pile of dollars, how many dollars would you have to spend to achieve 1BTC/day today?

(For our purposes, we can ignore the two-three-day shipping periods for existing equipment, and will not use pre-orders for equipment not yet built)

What is the cheapest we can do it today?

(Better hurry, in 3 more days it will cost a whole lot more)

My use of BFL singles was based upon prices for in-hand units from ebay, not for preorders from BFL.

Although imperfect, ebay is a generally accessible marketplace with price-discovery mechanisms. If people bid them up to around $1400, it is not unrealistic to utilize this as a price-point for purchases.

There must be a correlation between mining costs and coin values. If it cost zero to mine a coin per day the value of BTC would be effectively zero. (reduction to absurd). One could simply mine as many as they like rather than spend currency obtaining them. On the flip side, if it cost 1 trillion dollars to mine a single coin, the value of a coin would certainly be greater than zero or else no coins would be minted. So long as people continue to mine we must assume the value to be greater than zero.

The question that everyone should be asking themselves is "How to we measure and correlate that effect?".

The first step in solving is to look at what terms we need. We need a way to measure mining results. That is why I went with 1BTC/Day, a unit of measure which is independent of difficulty and btc value. 1BTC/day is a fixed unit that does not change.

Then we ask ourselves, what resources are required to generate the 1BTC/Day? What resources were required last week? last month? last year? But more importantly, the real question is: What will be the cost NEXT YEAR?"

If the cost to generate 1BTC/day is twice next year what it is this year, then the component of btc price that is affected by mining results should double as well. The final piece of the formula is finding exactly how much influence this cost has on BTC prices, and whether this influence is increasing or decreasing.

So many questions, so little time...

Yeah, but in my revised (unscrewed up calculations) you need right at 1 Th/s for 1 btc/day. So:

1000 Gh/s * 0.09 btc * 205 $/btc = $18450 for 1btc/day. Plus or minus a little here and there. Better than buying BFL singles on ebay, but still pretty pricey for coins.

Where can you get 1 Th/s delivered immediately for $10K? I am intentionally ignoring any pre-order offers because in every case the diff will change before they are ever delivered and brought online.

Wow, my math was messed up.  Time to show my work:

Each 60Gh/s machine generates nearly .06/ day.
17 machines will generate 1.04/day at 1024 Gh/s (1 Th/s!)
17 machines at $1400 each = $23,800.

That's a lot of cash to get a bitcoin per day for a very limited time. It appears bitcoins are stupid cheap at $200 each.

$12366 is the amount of money a consumer must spend on average today to have delivered to their home within 2 days the 534 Gh/s currently required to mine 1 bitcoin per day (24 hours).

This number was arrived at by using ebay prices for obtaining 60 Gh/s Butterfly units, the cheapest source I could find ($1400 each) for immediate delivery of hash.

I do not have any historical data for cost of immediate delivery of hash vs amount required to mine 1 btc/day, so I consider this the first data point. It is also important to note that every day more hash comes online, meaning that this datapoint is only really valid until the next diff increase, and is only an average of the cost across the entire 2048 diff bracket we are currently in.

While manufacturers can certainly generate hashing units at a far lower cost, I am looking at only what end user consumers must pay.

If others have information on previous datapoints it would be of some value for plotting the trends and someday determining the direction and velocity of the changes, and forecasting future prices of bitcoins.

I would not ignore the cost to mine a bitcoin/hour. This has been increasing at a level far faster than the price to just purchase one. This inequity cannot be maintained indefinitely.

The only thing that really happened was that some folks who think bitcoin is just another market that you use Wall Street strategies for got their clocks cleaned.

The only people selling at $160 and $155 were wonks and day-traders that had stuck in stop-loss orders. Now when they wake up in the morning, they can look at their balances, and then climb back into bed and cry into their pillows because they got their pockets picked.

Bitcoin trading is not Wall Street, and if you try that crap eventually you will get eaten.

Is anyone else actually selling devices that can be delivered in a day or two? (aside from ebay?) If not, they still have an exploitable advantage if they can bring gen2 to market within in the next month and flood the market.

I can't think of any but I might just have missed them.

Some fiat currency may have collectible or display value if it has nice pictures on it.

This is the question for which mining was intended as an answer. It is possible, but you must be both clever and lucky. One or the other is not enough.

I tend to agree with casascius. The first real milestone was parity with the USD. The second was parity with an ounce of silver.

The next real milestone will be parity with an ounce of gold.

After that? No other historic form of currency comes to mind to compare it to with regards to parity once you get past gold.

I would tend to think that if bitcoin achieves a reasonable (no telling what "reasonable" really means) market penetration that it would likely remain entrenched unless the something that comes along is vastly superior, or at least superior enough to induce retooling the entire existing infrastructure to accommodate a transition. Each day that the bitcoin infrastructure grows (in terms of adoption, services, acceptance, and even hardware) if becomes less likely that a successor can make headway. We may already be beyond that point unless the successor makes bitcoin completely obsolete for just about everything it does.

This is me pretty much agreeing with you.

I forgive your sacrilege.

But with an associated increase in risk. The risk/reward paradigm remains intact.

Pretty much anyone reading these words knows quite a bit about bitcoins. We are surrounded here with voices who have adopted and understand. It becomes easy to assume that the boat has left, so much "easy money" and "astronomical profits" has already been made. But honestly, well over 99% of the population of the earth has likely not even heard the term "bitcoin" yet. We see it in the news only because we are looking for it. To the average person it is so far off of the radar that it might as well not even exist.

The boat has not left. In fact, it is barely off the drawing board yet.

Only if you can mine them with a GPU again. Not much chance of that.

There is no such thing as a cheap bitcoin any more than there is a cheap federal Reserve note.

In 20 years I will pull this thread back up to the front page and no one will understand what we are talking about. By then most people will have forgotten all about those crazy dollar things we used to use. They will just be old collectibles you buy at flea markets for a few satoshis.

I think I do understand what you are saying. You are suggesting that the risk at this point might not be worth the reward. There appear to be plenty willing to take the other side of that bet. It could be $1000 in two weeks, and anyone buying today @ $200 is a genius. It could also be @ $50, and those who held their $$$ were geniuses. Only time will tell whether you or they have a better assessment of the risk/reward equation.