I wish I had kept the coins I bought back in those days as well.

just sayin'

The difference for my is working CPU vs Idle CPU.. Which is I'd estimate some 0.5USD a day in electricity, I've never turned of my PC anyways. More than that, it just mines in background with low priority and doesn't prevent me from doing anything with the PC, including gaming.

The income is negligible, I mine some 0.3 LTC a day, which is 1.2USD at todays prices. That's if the Litecoin is worth 4.1USD, as it does today. It did 3.4 yesterday morning. I ain't selling it for anything below $100 of course. Should it never reach that- oh well..

Mark, you also said to buy at $30 a couple years ago. Look how well that went for two years.

It touched 240.

l o l @ bitcoins.

Actually not exactly.. You don't have to trust in bitcoins to use them. You can keep an account on one of these exchanges, and in order to make a payment just convert on the fly. And in certain cases it ALREADY IS easier to pay for a service with bitcoins. Especially if you want to do it gray.

If these things are so great and bitcoins are here to stay, why doesn't the company keep them for themselves and mine all the bitcoins at a massive profit?

Either the "mining rig" is worth $2,499.00 or it's not. If it is, then why doesn't the company keep it? If it's not, why would anybody buy it?

This isn't like regular goods where after buying it, you'd need to use skill, or have access to some resource. You just plug it in and it gives you coins. It's like a golden egg laying machine. If you've got one, why would you sell it?

Yeah, but he's mining at 40Mhash/s, while that machine is 50Ghash/s, an increase of 1,250x. If they kept all the equipment themselves, then they could run their own pools and dominate the bitcoin mining corner.

But really what they are doing is selling performance enhancing drugs to cyclist. The first few people that buy in will do better relative to the regular folks, but soon everybody will have one, which will equalize the playing field and everybody will be back generating the same number of bitcoins relative to each other.

Why not both? They take space and consume electricity, so they can only run a limited amount of them. Sell the rest.

Roughly speaking, I think you're right - but I think there's a bit more too it than that.

The makers of these mining machines can probably estimate how many bitcoins the machines are capable of mining, and thus calculate whether it is worth selling them or worth using them to get the bitcoins themselves. If they sell the machines, they can get money right away. But if they use them to mine instead, they expose themselves to certain risks. eg. there could be a crash in the value of bitcoin; or an unrelated company might sell a heap of powerful mining machines which end up driving up the mining 'difficulty' and thus reducing the expected output of each mining machine.

Presumably the makers of these mining machines wouldn't sell them if they thought it would be more profitable to just use them instead - but there is a lot of uncertainty in the expected value of using the machines, and not a lot of uncertainty in the value of just selling them.

Because if you sell, then you decrease your ability to mine since everybody is chasing the same limited pot.

I agree, but it's more fun to just think of it as a company building mining equipment is betting that their product won't pay off.