Science & Industry

His issue is that before he could sit in an anomaly, watch local, and warp clear before someone could find him. Many folks depended on being able to dscan looking for probes for safety. In wspace it's even more dangerous now as you don't have local....

That's an inane assertion. It only makes sense to add value to mined minerals if it makes sense to buy them at what you would have sold them for and add value to mined minerals.

Deep space has its own set of problems which skew economics, so I'll only address high-sec.

I sell the equivalent of a super carrier per week so I think I know a thing or two about haulage (2 mil per half bil), scale, and broker fees -- in my case precisely .5037% in the specific case of buy orders. Mineral markets are incredibly efficient, and any time buy can be sold for a profit, it goes instantly. There are never, and I mean never, minerals in the quantity I need at below half a percent spread on market. The gaps on other materials are much much higher, and quantities much much lower.

As for sell orders, that's a ridiculous proposition, as the spreads are high enough that you're selling -- at best -- at break even. Again, markets are incredibly efficient.

The bottom line is you're mining at an isk/hr that matches what you could have sold them for, and then you're producing at your value add isk/hr, with time delays built in to convert the time spent into cash. Any rationalising around the edges doesn't change that blunt fact.

The reason mining isn't the most profitable profession, is miners routinely work themselves into Poverty!!!!!

Ratting gives you isk (a currency). While the true value of the currency changes with inflation, it is more tempered than say, minerals, because almost all transactions in EvE utilize it. It is the universal medium to trade.

Mining gives you minerals. The value of minerals is heavily based on the supply and demand of minerals. More miners mining mean the supply continually increases, and unless you have a demand to consume them, you will mine yourselves into poverty. The two ways to truly improve mining as an income stream is to increase demand (i.e. Big wars and massive ship losses are good for this) or to decrease supply (hulkageddon, interdictions, etc).

Botters, Multiboxers, and even the all-day players afk mining at work all play a role in creating large stockpiles of minerals. I don't know if they are the ones really at fault though, they are just the easy targets for Ire. The truth is, there are many, many, many miners in this game. To give you an idea, look through the QEN's (even if they are old).
Q4, 2010: Hulk #1 flown ship (2.5% of the populace, 19,046 ships), Retriever #10 most flown ship (1%, 7,514).
Q3, 2010: Hulk #1, retriever #6
Q2, 2010: Hulk #2, Retriever #6
Q1, 2010: Hulk #1, Retriever #5
Q4, 2009: Hulk #2, Retriever #6
Q3, 2009: Hulk #1, Retriever #5
Q2, 2009: Hulk #1, Retriever #5

In general, about 5+% of EvE's populace flies Mining Barges and Exhumers. Also regularly appearing on the list is the large number of Drakes (#2 or #1), Tengu's, Ravens, and Domis, which at that time, were very much PvE ships! This second point is important, because PvE ships have a much longer lifetime than PvP ships. And since ship production is one of the largest consumers of minerals, the turnover of ships is extremely important to the value of minerals.

That perfectly skilled hulk the OP is referring too can mine almost 10m Trit in an hour just using veldespar. The Q4, 2010 claimed there were 19k hulks and 7.5k retrievers. I realize that data is 3 years old, but I think we can conservatively estimate 30k barges, each on for 2 hours a day, each mining the equivalent of 5m Trit an hour, is a decent estimation of the miners in game. With that, we have an influx of 300 billion Trit a day. A domi takes ~10m trit to build, but we'll pretend its 25m Trit just because I'm looking at everything in terms of Trit. You would need to destroy 12k Domi's every day balance that influx of Minerals. That's 500 BS's, or 1000 Battlecruisers, or 2500+ cruiser every hour. I'm pretty sure the average rate of ship attrition is below this.

The point, miners historically over-harvest minerals compared to the ship destruction in game. The tiericide of ships over the last two years had a big increase in mineral demand, but since then things have been quieting down. I know people that get their minerals well below market costs because some mining operations simply overproduce minerals to the point they have stockpiles they have difficulty selling. At this point, if miners want their profession to become more "valuable", they need to make mining more difficult (so there are fewer overall miners), or they need demand to rise (i.e. Lots of ship explosions).

Risk VS Reward, the running factor in eve. Mining is crap because it's ****-simple to do, a day 1 toon can mine. Almost no risk, therefore almost no reward.

Where does that come in when we talk about trade ?

Reading this thread has makes me wish there were an "Innocuous Ratter01" through "Innocuous Ratter37", who would go blasting through systems, warping six cruisers to every belt at once, killing everything in less than a minute, and then moving on...

I did not read the entire thread. But there is an error in the spreadsheet. The cubic meters per cycle listed is for a single strip on a Hulk. But a Hulk can mount three strips. So all the numbers are low by a factor of three.
Even in high sec with just 2 Hulks and an Orca I get more per hour than shown on that sheet.

It's a long term investment. You mine it now and keep it until prices go up again.
After a while stocks on the market, of everything that's made with minerals, depletes.
All newly built thingy will have a higher price.
It just takes a while to get noticeable on a wider scale.

So you can sell the minerals later, or build stuff now and sell it later for much more money than you would have gotten before. If you're smart enough, you might even find items more profitable, or faster sellable, than others.

What I like about mining is that its income is in relation to the prices of everything that's built out of them.
Dare I say that having a huge reserve on minerals makes you lose less once prices go up and also stay up.