Right now mining is extremely unprofitable even with home owned CPUs and GPUs.
I guess most of the CPUs and GPUs miners are waiting for a spike to sell their coin and until then they are just doing charity for the industry? I always had this idea that why not the miners to decide the market price of a coin since they are the people who are doing the production.
Any thought?
There a very few 'home" type miners left in the market now days. A good portion of CPU miners are botnets, so it cost the "owners" of these bots nothing in terms of power and they can pretty much dump coins on a daily basis.
Also, a good majority of GPU miners now mainly consist of giant commercial type operations located in places where they can get very low cost power (2-3 cent/kwh). There are also probably a small percentage who get free power; either its included in their rent, or they still live at home or are in college with their parents footing the bill who are still mining.
So I think the remaining very few percent that actually pay for their own power and pay much above 5 cents a kwh for electricity may be doing some speculative mining and mining at a loss today simply in the hopes the prices recover soon. I doubt there are many people strictly doing it for charity of the network.