Bitcoin Forum

At the current block discovery rate, the difficulty level is going to be reset to 515,000 (plus or minus) at 3 PM next Monday, 6/6.

I think that might be the point at which CPU mining is *always* a money-losing proposition.

Right now you can make .01 (USD) per hour.


Matthew

Ah, I've been wondering when the next increase will occur. I'll be very surprised if it's a decrease.

Oh, it won't be.

The stats show that we're finding 8.2 blocks/hour, and the Bitcoin ideal is 6.

I wish it were otherwise, but it's going to be another increase.

Unless nVidia makes major changes to the way they handle OpenCL routines, profitability will go down to zero or worse first with CPU's, then nVidia GPU's and ultimately AMD/ATI GPU's.

In fact the only thing that can boost profitability if difficulty keeps rising is newer generations of AMD graphics cards that follow Moores law & double in performance every 1½ years.

if you are describing the situation where the value of bitcoins mined is less than the cost for the electricity consumed, that may be true.  but there are still many who are cpu mining and making money.  it happens to be those who are not themselves the ones paying for the electricity.

I looked at my current hash rate in the calculator w\ 515 and it still seems fine to me. 

Hopefully no more 78% increases though.

434 883 / 514 142 = 0.845842199 == 16%  increase

No 78% increase this time. If the price keeps going up though there will probably be a bit more capacity added and 20-30% jump next round or the one after.

This might be coming a lot faster as the price is spiking up. The hashrate is going up a lot now too.

As long as the BTC price increases, you shouldnt be worrying about the difficulty.
If you arent finding any BTC's, just join a pool, steady 1-2 btc a day, price per BTC lets say goes to $12-$15, your still OK, unless the price per BTC drops rapidly (which it should, then pickup right after)

I'm not totally sure where your numbers are coming from, but I'm fine with accepting them, CPU mining is a terribly wasteful application of resources anyway. I don't mean to be one of those eco-freakos but the application of 95-140W of electricity usage to gain a dollar or two x tens of thousands of people = massively wasteful use of limited resources.

When we all get some awesome solar energy generation or something go nuts, but til then I'll balk at super inefficient uses of power.

http://blockexplorer.com/q/estimate

http://blockexplorer.com/q/ for more info

I meant more his calculations for profitability.

Silly me ;) but I do agree with mining with a CPU will become a money-losing proposition.

in all fairness, i'm actually pretty happy with this 516000 number, thats a small increase compared to that last difficulty bump

Know what I'm saying! I was worried last increase that it'll keep being like that.

You are completely wrong in your last paragraph.  AMD cards didn't follow Moores law from 5850 - 6950.  In fact they got WORSE for mining.  It would be a good guess they are moving away from "mining" type cards and I can't imagine we will see any huge increases in stream processors etc.  I think we've hit the cap for GPU mining.

I guess you don't know me, but let's just say I'm one of the older members of this group, and I am very good about figuring out things like this.

I created a spreadsheet to calculate the profitability of mining with various cards/CPUs.

For electricity, I assumed 11 cents per kWh, which is the rate where I live. Wattage consumption figures couldn't get any more accurate -- I have a Kill-A-Watt meter. And hash rate is easily measure, as is the estimate of hash rate --> BTC earned on sites like deepbit.net. Then just plug in the current rate for BTC/USD and you're golden.

Matthew