The more I look through the forums I see people with negative comments and bad wishes. When I first started looking into this earlier I was so excited about it and seen this as a great thing. These people have me concerned. I have seen all kinds of scams and pyramids and the more I read the more I see a resemblance. Please help me to see the light again. I have great ideas for this to work.
I did some calculations while the network hash was 10.62Thash/s according to bitcoincharts.com. Please note this is now showing as 11.86 in less than a week.
Assumptions: 200Mh/s for an average GPU; 200W of electricity for an average GPU, 100W for a CPU; $0.15/kWh
55,700 miners based on those numbers.
An average miner makes 8 cents an hour at a $15/1BTC exchange rate.
11.14MW to make 300 BTC (1 hour's worth); $1,670 in electricity, or $5.57 per 1 BTC.
First 1.6 million BTC were mined at a difficulty of 1, which requires about 7Mhash/s. This means there were no more than 5-10 people mining (perhaps less) for the first 32,000 blocks.
These people used CPU mining which uses less electricity.
100W*10 people = 1 kWh to create 300 BTC, or $0.0005 per BTC. Going just by the cost of electricity, the cost to make these 1.6 million BTC is 1/11,140th what it would take today.
Between that original 1.6 million and today’s amount of BitCoins [approx. 6.6 million], it is hard to even guess how much electricity cost was used to make a BitCoin on average. But as the next million and a half BTC and more were still mined relatively easily, please allow me make a gross guestimate of a $2/BTC average electricity cost after the first 1.6 million coins. Using this number, we can get an average value per BTC. ((1.6M*0.0005)+(5M*2))/6.6M = $1.52. Today’s rate of $5.57 minus the average rate of $1.52 equals a $4.05 difference in cost to produce. That means for every BTC mined today, $4.05 or 73% of its electric value is equalized across every coin made before it. But as time passes and if the network grows, BitCoins become more scarce and require more work to mine, so those getting in at $5.57 are still, apparently, getting a deal.
A coin that is mined at a cost of $5.57 can be turned around and sold for $17, a 305% return. An original 1.6 million coin can be sold for a 3,400,000% return. Assuming continued network growth and controlled scarcity (less bitcoins given out to more people as time passes; no large sell-offs), these returns will continue to grow. But assuming there are no large sell offs is a huge assumption since it has already happened with 25k coins, and it caused a 65% drop in the value on mtgox.
