Really? you're going to argue this one? This is like the old joke, " i lose money on every sale, but i'll make it up in volume." What ever happens at 15 Gh/s will happen times 1000. If you lose money at the low rate, you lose at the high rate too, times 1000.

Something i notice when people look for ways to increase the value of what they mine. They forget that the number of coins mined during any given time period is fixed. Say you had your solar powered miner in orbit. how much would it cost to build it and launch it? How many bitcoins would it have to mine to break even, or make a profit? What would your hash rate have to be to mine that many coins in say 3 - 5 years? In the mean time, everyone on earth would be buying newer faster miners, decreasing your income. People forget that the supply of coins is finite and we are all fighting over the same coins. Everytime i increase my bitcoin income, i'm lowering everyone elses, and vice versa.

OP, your "economic standpoint" is flawed. In any fundemental Economics class they will teach you that anything is only worth what someone else is will to pay for it.

If you can't make a profit at 15 Gh/s, then you can't make a profit at 15,000 Gh/s either

I use BTC-e.com to turn NMC coin into BTC then transfer the result to my wallet. you can make the exchange address for your account the one BTCguild sends to.

The crazy thing is that people are actually paying these prices. let see what things look like in a couple weeks if the exchange rate keeps dropping.

Buying Bitcoins in the US is much more difficult than buying hardware. Buying Bitcoins doesn't appeal to me as being fun. Running my own little mining operation is fun for me. As i said, this is a hobby. I'm not in it for the money.

I'm not sure that this is true, because the difficulty will be set for the sum of the machines. So the traffic will be less.

But, the thing the sellers need to remember is that bitcoin goes up in jumps, not steadily. The difficulty on the other hand rises between expoential and linear. You can't justify raising the price because bitcoin value goes up. Difficulty already corrects for that by continually decreasing the amount of bitcoins any given miner can make.

You should be able to point more than one machine at the same worker without having to go through a proxy, unless you are using blades, then you need a proxy regardless.

Because Supercomputers aren't set up to do bitcoin type processing. basically the ASIC miners we have are the supercomputers for bitcoins. Bitcoin mining in general is too risky for mainstream businesses to involve themselves in.

The difficulty should be set to the value for 180GH. But if you set it low, the pool will just up it anyway.

Profit is a relative term. Anyone who expects to break even in terms of months is deceiving themselves. Don't bother. On the other hand over the course of your lifetime, or even a year or two, you will most likely make a profit.

OP Sell that thing so that someone who appreciates it can have it. I've been accumlateing Block erupters over time. I've got about 130 of those little suckers and since May this year I've mined 22 Bitcoin. at today's exchange rate, i've actually made a profit. The whole time people have been saying don't do it, you'll never break even. And I've countered with that for me it is just a hobby, because it is. showing a profit is just a fringe benefit.

And all the World (well, USA) rejoiced!

I hope people realize that these will sell out almost immediately.

I suspect that it is just a rounding error induced by only using 2 decimal places.

I concur, merge them.

Of course, how much is "a lot" is a relative term. I'd think that if everyone took the lowest amount out as often as possible the traffic would be overwelming. But, I'm not in a position to know.

It would depend on your difficulty. If your difficulty was 1 or 2 you would use more bandwidth than if it was say 10. But even at diff 1 with the Stratum protocol the bandwidth shouldn't be significant.