I would hazard a guess that that was when global routing table hit 512K routes and crashed a few hundred ISP routers worldwide? That might have been earlier in the year though.
In addition, that second link helps us work out what equivalent hardware at home we could use to accomplish a similar (non)return. Purchasing an AMD HD7970 graphics card, with a hash rate of 0.7MH/s, and mining with that could arguably be cheaper in the long run
Yes, that is true. My post was assuming the price of LTC did not change, although over the past 2 weeks it hasn't ventured very far north of of $24 or even very far south $22.
At the time of writing, Litecoin is at $23.50 and Bitstamp is showing Bitcoin at $821.
The cost of the lowest service is 0.75BTC pa, which works out to be $615.75 per year.
615.75/23.50 = 26.2021276596
At a rate of 0.5 MH/s, we're looking at 0.12406948 LTC a day[1] at the current network difficulty.
So, to mine 26.2021276596 LTC, it would take us 211.1891470779115 days. That came out a lot quicker than I thought it would, but still an exorbitant amount of time.
LTC is not my interest or strong point, so if there are any errors, please let me know so I can correct them.
For the commenter's applauding Jimmy Wales' new language skills, he's referring to the story of Amy Mather and her adventures with python and the Raspberry Pi. Linked video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a35XINnYFtA