[dualogy]

> I doubted that these ASIC rigs would ship any time soon. Wouldn't it be more profitable for the vendors to simply to delay/cancel orders and run the rigs 24/7 themselves?

Only if they're "long BTC". What makes you think they are? They're just providing shovels & tools to "miners in a gold rush". Historically, such providers have always done phenominally well.

At least they get the rigs at production cost to run them---selling them for good ol' USD may just be a hedge or sideshow, only time can tell.

[Too]

The difference with shovels is you need to be there and shovel yourself. Here if you have tool, you just plug it in and it does all the work for you.

[drawkbox]

There is energy expended during the process though. I imagine if this continues 'banks' of the future will be data centers. Also might be a way to make money on idle servers at data centers.

If anything this is an extremely interesting time in currency experimentation. Side effect of this is massive energy cost, another awesome side effect is hardware/supercomputer miniaturization and evolution. Great for really hard problems like verification (as in mining here) and maybe brain research/processing or other really hard data crunching problems.

[MaysonL]

I'm amazed that there hasn't been a scandal with some Googler or Microsofty or Appler or academic finding a way to use some fraction of their unused cycles for mining.

[Too]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin#Botnet_mining

http://thenextweb.com/au/2011/06/23/abc-employee-caught-mini...

Doesn't mention anything about the computing capability of those servers though.