My 7970 can mine at 10$/day using 1$ in electricity. The network difficulty has to be > 70 millions for the return to be negative.
If the price stabilizes at the 1000$/btc range, the difficulty will have to be > 250M for the power expenses to be greater than the btc mined with a GPU.
I'm sincerely scared, not from BFL, not from the helveticminer @ 28nm, but from the mass of GPUs coming online.
The return of our avalons... Is in serious danger.
What do you think?
Fortunately there are some Scrypt-based altcoins whose value is doing nicely to draw GPU hashpower away from mining BTC. So long as their market value holds, I think they will continue to draw GPU miners over there. Now if the numbers change a lot, it could be a different story.
I think that their collective value will largely hold just because ppl will see them as a safe haven from the ASIC "threat". (Maybe that's circular reasoning.)
That's my
BTC0.02.
(I have all of my GPUs hashing Scrypt at the moment, as they have been for some weeks now.)
http://dustcoin.com/