[Osiris]

in one month, you can expect to earn $20,724.53 dollars

They were selling the kit for $22,000, so it'll take at least 5 weeks for the ROI, probably longer given there will be at least 2 difficulty resets in that time frame.

I looked at investing in one but I couldn't come up with the funds. Instead I have pre-orders out for gear due in October.

If everyone begins doing this, then it will become extremely difficult to mine any Bitcoin without any sort of gear

This is already the case. I'm mining at about 250GH/s with 3 Avalons and I earn on average about 1.2 BTC per day per machine. A month ago is was closer to 2BTC per machine per day. Right now, GPU mining is dead. It's literally cheaper to buy a bunch of USB sticks that mine at 350MH/s for $100 each than to buy a bunch of video cards as the USB sticks are more power efficient. Even so, depending on the difficulty, those USB sticks could take a year to earn back the 1BTC.

[Groxx]

Since I hadn't heard about the USB sticks, and since the results of those are very relevant, I found this a bit interesting: http://thegenesisblock.com/asicminer-usb-bitcoin-miner-price...

So yeah. The shovels seem to run a decent risk of being worth more to sell than to use.

[makmanalp]

If it's so difficult to earn currency, then is it viable to use for end users? Is it just that everyone uses fractions of BTCs now?

[Groxx]

>is it viable to use for end users?

For mining, no. This was always seen as the future state, it was just a question of when. Not too long before the first ASICs started coming out, it was already basically not profitable for most people, you had to be running a limited set of GPUs and be in a place that had cheap electricity to make any real money.

>Is it just that everyone uses fractions of BTCs now?

Since they're roughly $100 each, yes, basically everyone uses fractions. Thankfully they're way more divisible than e.g. pennies, and if the value / userbase goes up by a couple orders of magnitude, they can be made more divisible, also unlike pennies.

[skriticos2]

Mining is there to make sure there are no double spends. The end user does not need to worry about them. Just sell stuff or buy them at exchanges or the other way around as with any other currency.