A few other things not factored in: Bitcoin market volatility. Number of miners will continue to grow (as many miners will indeed just run at a loss, due to the reasons in the list I've mentioned). Energy cost inflation. Hardware failures. The number of new BTC's generated will shrink over time. The cost of the computer around the video card. Your time. Market risk (e.g. bitcoin might get banned). The only way you might make money is if you happen to live in a place with cheap electricity and mine in bulk (but then there are scale costs e.g. facility costs, cooling, electricity infrastructure) .. very very risky. If you're not mining in scale, then you're unlikely to be making much anyway. Sorry, unless you got in early, BTC mining is mostly just idle entertainment for people with disposable income. But good luck and all the best if you're mining.

Kooool Aiiid ...

Here's the thing, it was profitable until about a month ago. I have actually done the math, and I have followed the prices very closely. Around the beginning of May, there was a huge increase in the number of miners that joined the system. For a while, the average BTC price tracked the average energy costs very closely ... until the mini-bubble peaked, mtgox.com was hacked, and a few other negative bits of news broke (e.g. senator announcing he was going after bitcoin, allinvain got robbed, and wallet.dat stealing malware came out). The the price tanked WELL below production cost, and then restabilized at slightly below production cost. However, all through all of this, the number of miners joining the system has just continued to increase.

Then finally, you don't also need to cover your marginal operating costs (energy) - you actually need to recover your capex costs. If your mommy and daddy bought you a nice machine with a fast GPU, or you bought one for some other purpose anyway like gaming, then you don't need to worry about that cost, but purchasing for mining right now? You'd be crazy or stupid.

Oh the irony, someone posting a lengthy detailed patronizing post on slashdot of all places, bragging about how he is plenty social where it "counts", in "meatspace", and is clearly superior to the rest of us because he is "not afraid" and "capable" of meeting "real flesh and blood people". Let me guess, I bet you also don't even own a television.

The biggest hindrance would be that the electricity cost to generate a Bitcoin is more than the value of a Bitcoin, meaning, you'd literally make an immediate operating loss on every Bitcoin generated. And that's before you even factored in other overhead costs like the IT administrator's hours and increased MTBF and possibly cooling costs and additional accounting costs and complexity and possibly (for any sizable cluster) upgraded electricity infrastructure/capacity.

Mining right now definitely costs more in energy than the value of the bitcoins generated, yes. And yet still people are mining more than ever. I presume that means one (or more) of several things:
1. People expect the bitcoin price to go much higher later, than the current price of electricity to generate a bitcoin
2. People can't do basic math
3. People are too lazy to do the math
4. People are mining for fun, at an expense
5. People expect all currencies other than bitcoins to devalue
6. A sizable portion of people may be mining on excess low-marginal-cost capacity e.g. solar
7. Miners are shifting costs onto unsuspecting victims, e.g. IT admin mining on university lab computers or corporate desktops, or a teenager letting their folks pay the energy bill
8. Some miners are focused in countries with low electricity costs (though I suspect the current differential makes all countries unprofitable to mine)
9. GPU vendors are putting their Kool Aid in the water supply
10. ??

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

Some people believe that you should not have that right, and they use words like "clarify" as euphemisms for "throw out".

Uhm, no, you've missed an important point. I know it's easy to be forgotten after 100 years of brainwashing to the contrary, but SCOTUS's job is supposed to be to UPHOLD the Constitution, not change it, and it thus makes perfect sense if the Founding Fathers were looking to have a court rule that would rule to overturn VIOLATIONS of the Constitution. Have you actually read the oath a SC judge takes? It states explicitly that they fall "under" the Constitution. Not above it, or to the side of it, but UNDER it. What is missing now is a "Supreme Supreme Court" to make sure the SC upholds the Constitution.

Put it another way: Do you really, honestly, genuinely - and think about this for a moment - do you honestly believe that the Founding Fathers believed that 9 random individuals should have the power to overturn the Constitution? Really?

If they're already better, as you claim, then we surely don't need a law then. Nice own goal there.

I'd say what would be "spin" is pretending there isn't a "ban" by playing with semantics.

It used to be that the stupidity got modded down, now the stupidity gets +5.

"Market forces" don't inherently ignore the tragedy of the commons if the property rights of individuals get respected, and the reason they don't is because of corporatism, which is decidedly not "the market". In a true market-based society, you would be able to sue the polluter and win, as pollution always infringes on someone's property rights.

"Idiotic" would be thinking that playing with semantics actually shows us that incandescents aren't actually, yes, effectively banned. An "efficiency standard" is a great euphemism though for a ban.

Congratulations, you've been "branded" by the jewelry industry.

If you're letting society dictate what is "in" and "out" for you as a man, even if it's literally "faux masculinity", then I think you've already missed the whole point of masculinity and "being a man". March to your own drumbeat.