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Comment by wewyor | Hacker News Reader

Where do I start selling pickaxes?

Sorry, ATI/AMD has that market sewn up.

Has anyone run through the power/hardware costs versus the mined amount in bitcoin and real currency yet?

Yes. I can't find the link, but I read an analysis a few weeks ago. IIRC: Six months ago you could easily build a machine to mine enough to pay for itself relatively quickly. Today it is probably still possibly but more difficult (you need to use GPUs or you can't compete) and the margins are quickly narrowing.

It takes about 3 months to pay off a $1200 - $1600 mining machine, nearly 4 if you have to pay for electricity. That all assumes the market stays in it's current state for that whole time. Highly unlikely.

By which you mean: this bitcoin thingy is analogous to the gold rush in which the miners make no money. Is this an educated assessment or a quick bit of sarcasm? Happy either way, just trying to understand whether Bitcoins are worth paying attention to...

Bitcoins definitely have a huge draw for the underground.

Of course, if governments persist in creating undergrounds...

Gold's a pretty good analogy. We're not quite to the point where it's impossible to make money mining, but you have to plan carefully to break even.

The real usefulness, though, of bitcoins/gold isn't to make money mining, but rather as a secure medium of exchange. Bitcoins are a bullion currency that you can spend online.

If you were generating bitcoins, and wanted to make them worth more so as to increase the value of your own CPU-time investment, you could always back them with real money—i.e. establish yourself as a micro-exchange where a certain number of bitcoins will be accepted and a certain number of real USD/EUR/whatever else given back. This would increase the stability and trustworthiness of the bitcoin network as a whole, meaning bitcoin demand would increase—meaning their exchange rate would increase.

Thus, a good second-order solution would be to realize people will inevitably want to build such micro-exchanges—and sell them software that builds them! (Or give it to them for free, but make it charge them transaction fees, etc.) Remember to make it SaaS, though—otherwise, you're just asking for a 100% piracy rate on this sort of thing.

And if you think the government could shut your SaaS down for breaking some trade regulation—well, stop running the SaaS, and instead run a third-order company that allows other, likely non-US-based companies run SaaS exchange-providers. Then build an aggregator with trust-metrics.

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