Back in February I preordered two Butterfly Labs 60 GH/s ASIC miners for $2400 plus shipping and import taxes into Canada. Total was almost exactly $3000. I had them sent to a good friend to run in BC. BFL is now selling 50 GH/s miners for double what I paid.
I bought them based on delivery estimates of May/June and if we had received them then we would have probably been doing about 2 BTC a day.
May/June turned into June/July, July/August, etc. We received them in October. By the time we got them, difficulty had shot up to the point where we were making .3 BTC a day. Within a few days this dropped to about .17 BTC every 30-36 hours.
We mined for about 6 weeks and made just slightly more than 6.6 BTC. As a bonus, when you mine for BTC you also earn Namecoins on the side and we generated just over 8 of these as well.
By my calculations, we had maybe 90 more days of earning by mining with these machines, making less and less each day, before we got down to the .01-.02 range per day. Those calculations can't take into account the big wave of TH/s miners that are coming in the next 2-3 months, nor what private groups might be doing behind the scenes.
So I listed the 2 boxes on eBay, and they sold for $3000 and $3050 each. So, I spent about $3000 and walked away with about $11,500 at current BTC market rates after eBay fees. Of course I'm just holding onto the BTC we made until it hits a million dollars
Now, onto altcoins. ASIC miners can only be used for Bitcoins and a few subsidiary coins like Namecoins you earn as a result of mining BTC. As someone said, there are people working on changing this so expect a Litecoin miner to hit the streets sometime in the new year.
Until that happens altcoins, like Litecoins, have different algorithms and are still mined with GPU and CPU power. Some of these are highly competitive and require multiple custom GPU mining rigs running 3 or 4 high end AMD video cards to get anywhere, while others remain somewhat untapped and can be mined on a typical workstation, laptop, etc.
I'm currently mining a few altcoins on my 3 computers running CPU and GPU miners on each (so I can mine two coins simultaneously on each machine), and am getting anywhere from a coin a day, to 50 a day, depending on which ones I mine. These are all Nvidia based machines and could do a lot more with Radeon cards. I'm considering upgrading my workstation/gaming rig to a 3 card Crossfire setup just to mine alts.
BTC is an arms race right now. To keep competitive you have to continuously upgrade hardware. GPU miners are useless for BTC. I sold off 120 GH/s of ASIC mining equipment that was quickly becoming obsolete, and the next thing to do would be to upgrade to 2 TH/s or 3 TH/s ASIC miners coming out in January/February. Sellers of such equipment are selling out within days of listing preorders. For example, these went on sale a few days ago
https://www.kncminer.com/products/neptune and I expect all 1200 machines to be sold out in another couple of days.
