Ask HN: does bitcoin mining pay off?

I'm curious whether there are people who do (semi-)professional bitcoin mining, for example with hardware like https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison, and whether this really pays off?

In the worst case, the costs for powering these devices is higher than the value of bitcoins mined, plus there is the risk of dropping exchange rates.

If it is somewhat profitable though, then I'm wondering why not more people are doing it, as it seems easy enough? If more people did it, would there be a risk of cannibalizing each others efforts? It might sound like naive questions as I don't know much about the mechanisms of bitcoins.

I've been mining since July 2011 with a small operation of 17 ATI 5830s.

With the amount of ASIC preorders currently speculated, I don't think its worth my time to upgrade. I'll be selling my mining hardware off this year.

The reason more people don't do it is because:

A) it's difficult. Since the vast majority of miners didn't get in early, they weren't able to get in on the "gold rush" that enabled them to ramp up hardware in accordance with their output. When mining first started, you could find blocks with a decent CPU. Since then, dedicated rigs have become almost a necessity if you plan to make any kind of money at all.

B) Electrical efficiency. Since the recent decrease (reduction from 50 bitcoin per block down to 25 per block) and the rise in popularity of bitcoin (thus rise in difficulty of finding a block.. it scales naturally), the "cost" of finding blocks has gone up. By that I mean it requires more raw computational power to mine, raising the bar on both the hardware needed to be relevant AND the amount of electricity consumed during the process.

There are a lot of calculators out there. They will give you some insight into how much you could make (or very likely lose) depending on your local electricity pricing.

A year ago, I entertained the idea of mining bitcoin, but with high electricity rates locally, the numbers and breakeven point didn't make sense. Long term edges in mining are based on specialized hardware and low electrical costs.

For me, it only made sense if bitcoin kept increasing in value, at which point it's much easier to just buy and speculate.

I was wondering about BitCoin and global power price arbitrage just today... The market may not be big enough to make it a very lucrative thing, but I still think it'll be a cool experiment to try. Especially since the computing requirements will only get more rigourous. Longer post here: http://adityaathalye.wordpress.com/2013/02/04/bitcoin-and-gl... [deleted previous comment - mistakenly added reply to comment one level higher]