Huge Wave of New Bitcoin Miners

We're seeing a huge surge of new miners and folks getting into Bitcoin. I thought I'd share some stats that might catch your interest. Today alone, more than 370 new users have signed up on this forum. That's it.

since what point?

Since a Chinese botnet got a CAPTCHA upgrade....

There was an article published about it on Yahoo.  I signed up to check it out.  My old computer is getting 900KHash/sec right now.  lol I'm considering upgrading and giving this bitcoin thing a go.  Question: How much could a guy expect to make mining in a pool with a new $1,000 machine (purchased wisely)?

Far less than you'll make by buying $1000 worth of bitcoins and sitting on them.

Exactly, at the current rate your $1000 investment would be worth $5000 within 1-2 months. I believe every single person thats started mining to date could have made far more money investing money into bitcoin rather than mining hardware.

Possibly I have 3 x 6990 going online in a week, another 9 following 2 weeks later and am looking for a room to put up a data center

I'm planning on upgrading my machine anyway, I was just going to wait until November.  If it would make more sense to upgrade now and do this for a few months, I'm on it. My question is for anyone who is actually mining and selling these bitcoins.  How much $ would you expect to get out of a $250 GPU per month?   I love the idea of bitcoins.  I'm interested in selling something so I can get signed up with exchanges and see how difficult it is to actually trade the coins.  Thanks again for the quick answers.  This is a great community (I'm going to search it and answer my questions now so I don't look like such a newb).

Past performance is not indicative of future performance, but feel free to think so. They could also end up buying 20$ as the market turns back to  <10$ for the next 5 years. Then what? Fact is - nobody knows anything for certain, there is only a likelyhood that people will keep being tight with BTC while difficulty skyrockets..and this fuels itself until we cascade faster into diffi rises and less BTC per block created than you can force people to pay more for BTC.

That's how we need to survive, sure we miners are whining about it, but we need more press to last in the long run. A miner purchased wisely could net 300$ optimistically. Think of it this way: if you mine you have a kickass gaming rig, if you prospect you could end up with nothing. However... you could also end up loaded by investing directly in bitcoins.. it all depends on luck really.

Well, for me it is a nice way to put some strategic funds into something with more returns than buying real estate I am quite happy with a 10% per month ROI on average, including depreciation. Anything more is a full pure bonus. And if thigns go wrong I am stuck with a number of really brutal calculation monsters. Which just happen to be what I consider buying for the trading side of my business anyway Tracking a couple of hundred thousand financial instruments is freaking out my current CPU clusters I think we will see some significant explostion in complexity and bad ROI in terms of Bitcoins / month, but at the same time I foresee that the price of a bitcoin will continue rising quite steadily to a 50:1 or 100:1 ration to USD.

You guys realize that you just told this guy that a new $1000 mining rig would never generate more than 55 coins, right? Because by "buying $1000 worth of coins and sitting on it" thats essentially what you did. 55 coins 1 year from now will be 55 coins. $1000 if spent on computer hardware will net 50 coins in about 18 days on solo mining (average). Id be PISSED if I took your advice, because after 18 days both methods would be out $1000, but in one scenario you still can generate coins, and have hardware you can sell. If you need help here, it ISNT the scenario where you buy 55 coins outright.

... and at 20% depreciation, you can still sell the miner's components for $800. um0rion wins the thread.

Yeah, I was just going to jump in and say the same thing.  Everyone saying that people shouldn't waste time and start mining and just invest in bitcions aren't considering a few points. 1) Hardware will still likely be worth money in the future.  Assuming you use it for a year, there's no reason to think you couldn't toss it up on eBay and get 33%-50% of your original investment back. 2) Bitcoins can tank and if you invest in just BTC you're SoL. Yeah, it looks great now with BTC jumping from $1 to $18 in a short period of time, but it could just as easily go back down to $1... Assuming BTC tanks I'd bet you see a ton of people stop mining which would make it easier to mine for those that decide to stick it out. And my favorite... 3)  Some people actually enjoy tinkering with and building machines, that alone is worth some of the cost right there.  I've had a blast tweaking and tinkering with my machines just to get a few more MH/s out of it. All I can say is don't jump in blindly and buy a mining rig by maxxing out your credit cards.  Put only the cash into the endeavor you can afford to lose.  If you want to hedge your bets, do both.  Take half your initial investment and put it into BTC, the other half into mining gear...

We need more bitcoin buyers over miners to drive up the price! Don't mine. BUY!

That right there is an excellent reason. Especially for those who want to really take the time to sit down, learn a bit of bash scripting and how to operate a headless GNU/Linux box. It's a great experience and is actually beneficial to your skillset for future IT endeavors.

If you're thinking buying mining hardware, read this first https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6566.0

If everyone invested into bitcoin, there wouldnt be any bitcoins to invest in. Remember, both sides of the spoon needs to exist in order to make this market work.

A this moment BTC is $1 below the current high == A chance to buy now!

Good read.  Thanks.