Media hype, good old fashioned ego, and likely some multiple-account bid-up schemes is my guess. I hope there aren't a lot of folks buying to "support the community" as those folks are just getting themselves fleeced and making bitcoin less attractive to new comers and reducing the size of the community. I have not bought significant bit coin nor mining hardware because the former is clearly very risky, and the later is only possible at a guaranteed 50-80% loss given stable prices. I've seen a few rigs out there at the higher price ranges that are more like 25% guaranteed loss given stable prices.

The maximum intrinsic value of a miner should be considered as total lifetime bitcoins calculated by the miner before it becomes more expensive to run than the bitcoins it generates given stable prices. Considering anything other than stable prices is market speculation, which is more efficiently done by buying coins directly. Even the stable price assumption might be a speculation given the trend in the last 1.5 months.

The only good reason to buy a miner is to make a profit, or for entertainment. Bad reasons might include laundering money, or for market speculation. Buying the miner for speculation is particularly bad because it ties up your money in a non-liquid form that takes days to recover (resell on ebay) or months to convert to bitcoins (mining).

So Every week or so I check prices and someday when there are miners for sale at a price far enough below intrinsic value to account for the market risk and lack of liquidity I may buy one. I don't expect that to be soon, because there are still many fools out there who heard about it on CNN, and don't do the math, probably many of them are buying second or third miners at larger sizes convinced that the problem was they didn't "go big" enough...

I have noticed that usb miner prices are improving, the going rate for an ant miner worth 15 dollars is about 50, whereas a month ago a 333 usb miner was 60 and worth about $5-7 lifetime intrinsic value...

End analysis you are right, nobody buying miners is making money right now, only the people selling them. Folks who got on early pre-order probably made money, but with the present hype and no new round of (very risky) pre-orders for next gen tech, there's no money to be made, just entertainment to be had, which is why one of my spare computers is mining trivial amounts using it's graphics card at a loss... just for fun, at a small cost.

fixed that for ya

'

If the feeding frenzy lasts for another 3 months...

In march... don't miss this from the bottom of the description "This is a PRE-ORDER, available for dispatch at end of February 2014" use an online calculator... difficulty increases have been averaging near 25-30% and it's going to be shooting up when the new machines start firing up. Order now and there'll be a lot of folks getting online before  you.

Nothing out there is not worth much if you get it in march unless difficulty stalls out or price goes back to it's 10x/month rate of increase (both of which are unlikely imho). If you start on march one, and ignore electricity and shipping, then 100Gh in marge will get you around $350 in ~70 days, and less than $100 for all time to come after that.

Also don't miss the "minimum order 10 units" at the top...

I'm more or less willing to pay something just under a break-even for lifetime price. That eliminates most the market risk for the seller, and frees up the invested cash to do something else more profitable that what remains on the outgoing technology rigs. That really ought to be a good deal for them.

I guess I'm just royally irritated that the suckers are making all entry points into the market a (nearly) guaranteed loss even with the assumption of fairly substantial further rises in bitcoin prices. Amazon searches today don't turn up anything better than ebay searches, probably because all the sellers on ebay raided amazon and are now re-selling it on ebay/amazon...

Nobody buying it will take a month or two is my guess. A bunch of folks are going nuts it seems and it will take them a week to get set-up and another week to begin to suspect there's a problem, at which point half of them will conclude the problem is they didn't buy a big enough miner and go back for more, and then two weeks they'll decide miners are expensive rip-offs and contracts must be the way to go...

Plus I've begun to wonder how much of it is fueled by stolen accounts and organized crime laundering money...

Oh yeah the moneys legit too... I sold Bit coin mining contracts on ebay to get it, you'd be amazed how much some folk who don't have the required equipment will pay to rent it!... want to see my miner? It's in my pocket... it's tiny and it does THREE HUNDRED AND THIRTY-THREE MILLION hashes per second! Powerful stuff! Ain't technology amazing your honor?

*sigh*

Ok so I'm not the only one that thinks ebay is crazy  . I'm new to bitcoins too but I did the math Kinda feel sorry for all those folks who failed math class and are now throwing thousands and thousands of $$ away...

Aside from assuming 2-3 months of market risk (and in most cases laying down thousands of $ to take that risk) by pre-ordering the new generation miners, is there a good place to find a non-sucker price on a miner that at least breaks even in 3 months? Generally I don't want anything drawing over 1500w since my house mostly has 15 amp circuits and 60 amp total service. (I've located one 20 amp circuit but it's not conveniently located).

Everything I see when I search for bitcoin miner on ebay is selling for 2-10 times it's likely value... Every time I plug in anything resembling a reasonable set of values into a calculator like the one on thegenisisblock or bitcoinwisdom, and compare it with an ebay auction things don't even come close to lining up. The ONLY way I could see justifying the values placed on say a bitfury usb miner (usually $300-400 with multiple bidders over $300) is if you were going to turn around and offer the contracts that I see on ebay that often sell for 2-10 times their worth....

And then there's the 333Mh/s usb asics that sell for as much as $60 and might mine $10 worth of coin before they loose money on even at 2.5 watts...

Am I missing something or are they all just nuts? It's so universal that I begin to doubt myself... If those prices do make sense, can someone please tell me why.

Note that given the volatility lately, I hardly doubt an assumption of continued growth at 10x/month is likely I've been running calculations presuming steady value (my actual expectation is a little more moderate dip in price for 1-3 weeks and then begin to rise again at a more moderate pace, but the simulators don't let you get that complicated and I haven't built a spreadsheet or written a program to do that because it seems that there is zero means to acquire any hardware at a price that even *remotely* promises to be profitable... )