> Who knows about the bitcoin mining because that's all nonsense anyway.
Nobody in their right mind uses GPUs to mine bitcoin any more. They use custom mining chips (ASICs) which are about 100 times more efficient, because the calculations are done entirely in hardware, and being fairly simple, can be parallelized much more than graphics cores.
As far as bitcoin being nonsense, the New York Stock Exchange and a large bank just invested in a bitcoin company: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/..., and Microsoft accepts bitcoins: https://commerce.microsoft.com... . Evidently they don't think it is nonsense.
> But I'll bet their little programs that they run using $1 of electricity to get 50 cents in bitcoins
I did mine at a loss sometimes back in the day, but it was in the background, for a graphics card I was already using in this PC. So I only had to pay for the incremental electricity of the card running full bore instead lower levels. The $60 of extra electricity is worth $680 in bitcoins today. I stopped mining in mid-2013 when the custom chips started going into volume production. Not all of us are idiots.