Bitcoin Mining Difficulty

[digitalbaron]

I am curious what the current average mining "difficulty" rate tends to be?  Or does this vary by machine?

[BitNit]

I am curious what the current average mining "difficulty" rate tends to be?  Or does this vary by machine?

I'm not sure what the difficulty is atm but the machine doesn't have anything to do with the difficulty.

[digitalbaron]

I just found a Bitcoin mining profitability calculator at http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ and it reports 12,153,412.  I wish I found out about BTC earlier :-)

Here is a good matrix on the history of BTC mining difficulty:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc#gid=0

[Kaepora]

I just found a Bitcoin mining profitability calculator at http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/ and it reports 12,153,412.  I wish I found out about BTC earlier :-)

It is a tad late honestly, even with a GPU.
We shall see what happens when all those ASICS are released into the wild.

[2jase]

It really depends on your electricity costs. Most of the calculators still show a profit from GPUs with payback in the 5-6 month range even at NY, NJ, DC, CA prices.  Best of all when GPUs stop being profitable you can sell them to gamers for close to what they cost you, or start mining another cryptocurrency.

Yeah, I wish I'd jumped in two years ago too when I first started hearing about BTC.  Of course BTC 2 years ago is roughly where LTC is now.  Maybe.