If you plug the numbers in you'll see that to all intent and purposes, private mining for BTC is now useless unless you invest in a USD$5K+ ASIC mining rig and even then the rewards are not guaranteed as the overall network difficulty (how hard it is to find a block) keeps jumping every few days (see http://bitcoindifficulty.com). Basically, you'll end up underwater if the value of BTC drops from its current high.
I also missed the BTC mining boat and instead have decided to mine Litecoin (working on the assumption that a rising speculative tide floats all ships).
Litecoins use a different hashing algorithm (scrypt) which is designed to prevent a mining arms race and keep it feasible for CPU miners to continue finding blocks.
I joined the liteguardian.com pool 5 days ago and have three servers mining (each has an Intel Xeon CPU E31245) and I will have made 1LTC tomorrow. At the moment 1LTC is trading at just over $40. It was $6 a week ago.
Another option which I discovered yesterday is http://www.kraken.com - they appear to be a fully fledged FX platform that allows margin/leverage trading on BTC. Risky though unless you know what you're doing (I don't).
Edit: have just sent you an invite to the liteguardian pool in case LTC mining interests you.
If you plug the numbers in you'll see that to all intent and purposes, private mining for BTC is now useless unless you invest in a USD$5K+ ASIC mining rig and even then the rewards are not guaranteed as the overall network difficulty (how hard it is to find a block) keeps jumping every few days (see http://bitcoindifficulty.com). Basically, you'll end up underwater if the value of BTC drops from its current high.
I also missed the BTC mining boat and instead have decided to mine Litecoin (working on the assumption that a rising speculative tide floats all ships).
Litecoins use a different hashing algorithm (scrypt) which is designed to prevent a mining arms race and keep it feasible for CPU miners to continue finding blocks.
I joined the liteguardian.com pool 5 days ago and have three servers mining (each has an Intel Xeon CPU E31245) and I will have made 1LTC tomorrow. At the moment 1LTC is trading at just over $40. It was $6 a week ago.
Another option which I discovered yesterday is http://www.kraken.com - they appear to be a fully fledged FX platform that allows margin/leverage trading on BTC. Risky though unless you know what you're doing (I don't).
Edit: have just sent you an invite to the liteguardian pool in case LTC mining interests you.