Yes.
Even if a GPU can’t keep up any more, I’ll bet that ten thousand GPUs still can. And if you can get those ten thousand GPUs for cheaper than one ASIC rig (like, say, for free, by stealing them), then it’s very economical indeed.
Huh, I just ran the numbers and I suppose it could work, but I’m having to be very generous.
Best GPU at the moment could get maybe 1 GH/s. With a current network rate of 37 PH/s, that’s 1/37000000 of the network hashing power. So one GPU gets 25/37000000 = 0.00000073 BTC per block. Blocks every ten minutes, so that’s x144 for a day, so 0.00010508 BTC per day. Current value of $700/BTC gives $0.0736 per day per GPU.
But we’re not talking about the GPUs in laptops or even mid-range desktop towers, you need specifically the highest end AMD cards, the kind of noisy hot doorstops that only the hardest core of gamers will have, and they WILL notice their games glitching and slowing and crashing. And the difficulty jump is still pretty brutal. You can expect the revenue to continue dropping 20% or so every 11-12 days for the next three or four months at least.
Lastly, by ‘significant mining’ I meant ‘a significant proportion of the total hashrate’. That simply can’t happen any more. But yes, one or two botnet authors might still be able to make a comfortable income for the next six months or so. Their hashing won’t be significant for the network (which is what I meant) but it might just be nice for their wallets. But ONLY for the next six months, tops, which just isn’t the timeframe Bitcoinistas like me are thinking about. 
For the average home “miner”, mining bitcoins by themself is no longer feasible, due to the ASIC chips that are used for bitcoins (and other sha-256 algorithm coins). As noted, you can “make” 7 cents a day, but after subtracting power costs, you are in the red. For someone wanting to mine at the hobbyist level, the “alt” coins are a much much better bang for the buck, with profit ratios of 40-100 times greater than mining bitcoins.
Granted, the vast majority of these “alt” coins, are crap, however Litecoin is the most stable and well-regarded, and is often considered as the silver to Bitcoin’s gold.
ASIC chips for Scrypt-algorithm coins do not yet exist, however they seem to be more likely released sometime later this year.
Now that mining Bitcoins is no longer profitable, does that mean that new Bitcoin discovery will slow down to a trickle, or nothing?
And if new Bitcoins are not being added to the supply, does that spell the end of it as a currency? One of the key features of Bitcoin was that there was a way for new Bitcoins to be gradually added to the supply, therefore avoiding catastrophic deflation.
It’s no longer profitable for people without specialized hardware. People with that specialized hardware can still make a small profit on it.
There are a finite number of bitcoins, so they will eventually have to deal with a constant supply no matter what.
There’s a company called Cloud Hashing that operates a server farm in Iceland containing dozens of machines that are designed to do nothing but mine bitcoins, renting time on these machines to investors. It reminds me a bit of the people who operated gold farms, paying people to play games like World of Warcraft to acquire virtual goods in the game that are sold to others for real money.
Nope.
Miners are discovering a number that makes a new “block” in the “blockchain”, allowing a set of transactions to be recorded (entered into the blockchain). There’s another bitcoin thread here with a post that explains this remarkably well in fairly nontechnical terms.
Miners are establishing transactions, others validate those transactions. As mentioned above, validation is cheap: it’s basically running a crypto checksum algorithm. Mining requires coming up with a number so that the crypto hash starts with N zeros (wher N floats democratically, as you mentioned above.)
Correct, but in the process of mining a new block, they include a transaction in the block that awards them an agreed-upon number of bitcoins for their efforts, and this essentially creates the bitcoins in question.
Or you can buy some “Mining Gear” here
Hmm… in my mind this is still, practically speaking, how the transactions are validated, since this is the process that prevents fraudulent transactions from happening, but I see the vocabulary distinction now between establishing and validating, and I’ll update mine accordingly.
Here a definition of OpenCL - Open Computing Language.
OpenGL is this- Open Graphics Library
Both is code from the Khronos Group