Have the ASIC BTC miners paid off?

[kocureq]

The recent increases in difficulty make me wonder.

For all of the people who bought (not constructed themselves, just bought for $$) ASIC miners for BTC - have they paid off? Including the electricity bills?

Whatever is being thrown to the market right now, looks like a great deal when it's announced, but it becomes worse deal after a monthj or two when the difficulty rises again.

[ziegengert]

...
Whatever is being thrown to the market right now, looks like a great deal when it's announced, but it becomes worse deal after a monthj or two when the difficulty rises again.

I would say that's exactly the case: because every batch coming onto the market, will create a rise in difficulty making mining less efficient, and this will apply even more the latter you get your miner. In that tenor I would exspect, that for the asic developers it's a really big buisness, just by "testing" there devices and selling them. I dont want to say that you won't earn money with your device then, but at least without an intensive investment of money you wont be able to skip working, sit back, relax and let your miner printing money. At the moment it seems at least to me more efficient to mine alternative crypo coins and hope for a possible increase in value, than buying a asic miner for bitcoins.

[echz]

The recent increases in difficulty make me wonder.

For all of the people who bought (not constructed themselves, just bought for $$) ASIC miners for BTC - have they paid off? Including the electricity bills?

Whatever is being thrown to the market right now, looks like a great deal when it's announced, but it becomes worse deal after a monthj or two when the difficulty rises again.

I originally started with 6 BEs, then bought another 10 more, then bought another 9 more for a total of 25.  When I purchased them, I knew I had little chance of making half of my money back on them...

Then I threw caution to the wind and against my better judgement I purchased an Avalon Mini 60gh/s rig off of eBay.  I figured at the time, I'd at least make some of my return back on that hardware -- then one thing happened that really helped my ROI dreams -- Bitcoin value tripled!  I can say in less than a month, I've almost paid off the Avalon Mini, and once that's done I'll work to recoup hopefully what I lost on the BEs. 

What's going on the market now is probably hash-strong, but will presumably come with a steep price -- Hell, even the Avalon mini I bought for ~$1,100 US just recently was selling on eBay for $3,600+ which to me says mining is now either a rich man's game or still viable for someone who got in early enough with the right amount of hashing power ... not for the new/weak-in-pocket adopters. 

[reannypleas]

Well the difficulty really jumped, about 5 times, but the prices went up about 8 times so I imagine most people should have made their money back in the first month or so.
Everyone was expecting the difficulty to go crazy in the last few months, but no one really saw the price hitting almost $1000  that soon

But if these mining units were purchased with Bitcoin, USD/BTC price increase doesnt matter, your break even only if you mine the Bitcoin used to bought the mining units back