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How can I compute mining profitability?
Do bitcoin miners like the one depicted in the video below with 24 server clusters actually profit from bitcoins at the current prices? Are the bit coin exchange rates high enough to cover their costs of electricity and hardware? And is there enough liquidity in the market to actually unload them?
Or are all these miners hoarding them in hopes the idea will take off in the future?
Miners have about 26% profit at the moment, that's includes only cost of electricity vs bitcoins sell price.
Serith's answer has a good approximation for the operating costs. On that website, you can also see that miners have negative profits if you include hardware/bandwidth costs.
So it is profitable to mine, but it is not profitable to invest in mining hardware right now. Of course that these numbers often change according to several factors - BTC prices, mining difficulty, hardware updates, etc.
As for liquidity, MtGox alone moves around 1 million coins each month so that shouldn't be a problem (the total monthly bitcoin production is ~216000 until next year).
At current valuations ($5.59 as I write this), the profitability of GPU mining is dominated by the cost of physically housing, cooling, and maintaining the GPU mining rigs in a commercial scale datacenter. Electricity and rig capital costs are both less. Electricity and GPU hardware depreciation costs are generally the only costs considered in today's mining profitability calculators.
Our analysis can be found here.
