Bitcoin Forum

Hey There, I'm fairly new to the market, and certainly no techy, but I've recently started mining BTC.

So far it's producing as planned, but while trying to predict how long it will take to mine enough BTC to payback my investment, and trying to decide if I should invest more,  I realized that sometime around the end of next year (right around when I'm thinking I'll break even), the block sizes being mined will split in half to 12.5BTC each, as they did in 2012 from 50 to 25. 

Does anyone have any insight into what this will mean for the value of Bitcoin and the profit of mining?  Is the value likely to rise as new bitcoins become more scarce overnight, or will my mining profits simply be cut in half, making it no longer viable?

The value is likely to rise but mining won't necessarily become more profitable because mining speculators will likely account for such expectations thus increasing difficulty and mining costs.

The question you should be asking yourself is if purchasing the bitcoins directly vs mining will be more profitable. Purchasing bitcoins now is very likely to be a good investment. Mining profitability more has to deal with whether you make a very sizable multimillion dollar investment , you have access to free electricity, or you have perfected some new efficiency methods in cooling or upkeep.

perhaps this should go in the speculation section. But the answer is obviously no one knows. Some think it will go up, some don't. The problem is, there are way too many factors affecting bitcoin's price, we just don't know how big a factor the block rewards are.

if for you is comforting , I can tell you that the last halving has seen a rise in price, but the history does not necessarily reflect the future, it is just an indicator

nonetheless i'm confident that the halving will bring a rise

I personally suspect a rise around that time (or at least at that time the price will be significantly higher than now) but that's not so much because of the halving as much as the infrastructure of bitcoin becoming a lot more mature, and more awareness that bitcoin isn't a scam, and isn't fake because it's virtual. More acceptance in general.

If you are using your miner until it has mined enough to repay your initial investment then you have probably kept it too long.

It is probably going to be most profitable to buy a miner, have it mine for some period of time and then resell the miner, for hopefully a price that will allow you to have a profit after taking into consideration the cost of electricity that the miner used while mining.

So far in 2015 the difficulty has increased very little when measured by historical standards. This should hopefully allow used miners to hold their value much better then they did in the past. 

I agree that there will be rise in price at the halving. And I'm not saying this following example will happen, but it could easily.

Example: The price may go down to $175 or so again (that already happened this year so far) or lower, and the price could then rise to $200 at the time of the halving, which even though it went up, it's actually down from now.

Personally, I'm not that pessimistic. I think the price will go up more in the future, but no one knows for sure, and it's just as easy the example above would happen instead.

It's a little more complicated than that - but in order for miners to remain profitable they would require the price to go up (i.e. they would only sell at a higher price). This would tend to create a scenario where you only see trades at higher prices and therefore would expect higher prices. However, if for some reason there is little demand, and the price falls/stagnates you would instead see that some miners would turn off their mining operations as it is no longer profitable - thereby reaching an equilibrium.

It means your profits will be about half as much. 

Hopefully the halving should mean an increased price but unfortunately no one really knows. Though with supply and demand, one would assume the price would rice due to less availability.

I think that getting into mining now is still good. But toward the end of this year will be a bad time to get into mining, you won't break even.
I think when the halving happens there will be a serious decrease of difficulty, and a price rise. They will probably meet  half way, leveling off where it is just profitable enough to mine, like it is at the moment.
I'd say mine as much as you can now while the going is still somewhat reasonable.

If the value doesn't skyrocket with the next halving run to the hills.

Personally, I think that the chances are that we will see a price increase.
How much increase, nobody knows.
It could be in the range of one figure, or it could be in 2 figures or even more.

I have learned to expect the worst and receive the most... for that reason, I expect a small rise in price, until miners leave or adapt and demand are back to where it was.

So my guess would be a small temporary spike, and then a gradual decline, until it reach the same levels, where we are now.

If there is "fireworks" for some reason... I would be happy... but for now... I go with small changes.  ;D

The price will be increase, that's for sure, but can't expect it will double the price.

Think you better work out the calculations carefully because with current difficulty level and rising, unless you have your hardware properly set up and optimized with the cost if hardware and electricity taken into consideration, profit should be razor thin. Moreover with the halving taking place next year to cut the reward to half, it will be even more challenging.

The price will be increased, but not sure how much.

For more insights, try:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=81.0 -> top right, search field, enter "halving"
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/search?q=halving&sort=new&restrict_sr=on
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/search?tab=newest&q=halving
Or just wait for this question to be asked again in Two Weeks™ ;)

No one really knows.  It will be a interesting time for sure espically for miners.

I'm hoping before halving we see a increase in btc,but I don't think we will see double.   It will effect a lot of old miners, and will be interesting to see what it does to miners who can  keep going.

Not a think will happen directly related to block halving.

Feather coin and Vertcoin wanted to do the same by changing their algos to disable ASIC from mining these coins. The entire idea was to limit supply and guess what, nothing happened, the price even went down.

Non sequitur.

What does disinflation and changing the algo to become ASIC resistant have to do with each other?

Next block split to 15 BTC per block is going to be fun times and will be interesting to see if price goes anywhere in the up movement. If it doesn't then no doubt a BTC clone will come along and dominate the markets and theirs a real good change of something knocking bitcoin off the top

I am going to go out on a limb and say that the miners account for a pretty small share of the amount of bitcoin traded on exchanges so the "fact" that miners do not want to "sell at low prices" is not going to prevent the price of bitcoin from trading at a "low" price

I don't know if i agree completely. Yes pools do get some miners fee's etc.  But even the big mining corporations have to sell on a exchange or direct to pay their bills.   Large corporations and a lot of home I see at least electricity amount of BTC being sold.   Which is a lot of btc with the big companies out there.

Actually the fact is that by the time the halving comes a lot more people will be trading Bitcoin. The fact that only half the new coins will be entering circulation will force what could be double the scarcity.

I think that now we are still early adoption as far as Satoshi's original plan. Enough Bitcoin to go around and few people using it. The next halving will actually cause the scarcity to start being felt.

Well the coins that are already in circulation (the coins that have already been mined) will still be available. The number of additional coins potentially available for sale per day will obviously decrease, however I don't think that in itself will cause the price of bitcoin to rise.

I don't think Satoshi necessarily planned for bitcoin to evolve in any certain way as far as user adoption is concerned. He did setup block subsidies so that the miners would get primarily block subsidies early on and little tx fees, then tx fees will make up a larger portion of the total block rewards as times going forward, however as it stands now by the time the next block subsidy halving takes place, when compared to the total block reward, tx fees will be a very small portion

I`m worried less on the halfing but more on the whole part with what im about to say.

"Bitcoin Core has no code in it to handle a permanent and growing transaction backlog. "

what happens when transactions are super slow as fuk, hence a ultimate incident way back when.

transaction fees will rise and block size will expand .  no other solution works.

transaction fees are the only way to kill off spam transactions. 

The fees are indeed super cheap at the moment. Throw 1$ in fees for your transaction and it will confirm quickly.

I'm not so familiar with all the technicality of expending the block size and not so sure about why it is so controversial.

Pushing the upper limit of the block to 8mb doesn't mean each block will use it all.

As for the price rise, BTC's first price was based of the cost of mining one BTC with CPU back in the time. Since bitcoin now can easily be acquired by other means then mining it, this is hard to tell for sure how much influence it will have on the price.(The halving) As someone said before. Offer and demands normally rules the price but in this case, since all the miners introduce fresh money, I think it will push it up.

Let's see how the LTC react until his halving. For now, the price is just insanely going up. Pretty sure a massive sellout will come around the corner. I'm no specialist at all in economics, so this is only my 2 cents but the price has to go down and correct himself for sure ... But who knows ! The price will go up until the demand is high and it looks like the halving has something to do with the current insane uptrend.

Then the I" wish i knew and bough 50000$ LTC at 1.25$" (or whatever low price it was like 5-6 weeks ago)

:D