Mining a bitcoin costs about as much as buying one these days

[yudif]

You should not forget the fact that a lot of people had already recovered the set up cost for their mining equipment and are thus in huge profit now. However, those starting out with bitcoin mining now will have to bear loss because of this.

[stompix]

I don't see the contradiction, I just made a point about mining, the line after the breakpoint wasn't about it. The breakpoint was just math, something that I might have done wrong or maybe not, but we can discuss more about that if you want.

Well, Heretik beat me on answering this , nice job as he answered far better that I would have  (

You made two assertions that are in direct conflict:

1) The break-even point is the same for each miner. ("The current break-even point for Bitcoin mining is $8,038.")

2) The break even point is different for each miner. ("That said, whether or not mining still makes sense, depends a lot on where you are.")

So which one is it?

The problem with your assumption (TitanAI), was that there is a median cost, driven up by people that spend 20k $ to mine one bitcoin.
But in reality, those guys would not exists. Who would be insane to mine at that costs? Nobody.
There is no logging company in Atacama , there is no banana farm in Sweden.

So you can't really approximate the average costs.
Even if somebody is mining in Poland for example, you can't be sure that they pay 0.10 cents a kwh or 0.2.

 

[TitanAI]

Just found out from a friend that the cheapest to mine is in Venezuela, is that true? I mean Trump just banned in the US the use of Venezuelan cryptocurrencies.