Originally Posted by rowan

Many people did the "amateur farm" thing back in the early days. I remember a guy maxing out his credit card to buy $35k worth of GPUs and associated computer parts. People thought he was crazy, but I'm sure he had the last laugh, because that was when BTC was worth about $4.

I stopped GPU mining in about 2011 when the cost of electricity was roughly equal to the value in BTC I was mining. I should have kept going; at the time I was mining around 1BTC per week; I can still see those transactions in my wallet.

With regards to current profitability, even if you had free power it would be difficult to break even. The combination of consistently rising difficulty, and the upcoming block reward halving will mean it's difficult to make back the cost of your mining hardware before it becomes obsolete. Then again, the reward halving could push the value of BTC up, so people could be mining at a loss - like I should have done in 2011...