Bitcoin Forum

Any miner who isn't making a big return now starts to lose money at the next halving. Who's dropping out at that point?

Are the big players buying new hardware, or just getting the last revenue out of the old stuff?

I think bitcoin will see a large increase in value after the halving, the mining industry creates inflation and a flooding of btc on the open market.  After the halving there will be significantly less btc entering the marketplace.

The drop will be from 3600 BTC/day to 1800 BTC/day (on average). I remain baflled though on what drives the price of Bitcoin. Yes, I know about "Supply and Demand", but I have yet to see a coherent explanation of how either supply or demand are measured. I do know that if by some miracle BTC price went to $1000, the supply would increase dramatically, not from new miners, but rather current holders of coins. By the same token, I have no idea what drives the demand for BTC. For me personally, I have zero actual desire for BTC as a currency.

I think that after BTC  halving we can see the dramatic BTC price drops .

It is very possible, that after halving Antminer S5 does not make a profit with Hashnest  electricity price $0.001175/GHS/Day.

can someone inform me on when exactly the halving is taking place?

http://bitcoinclock.com/

Thats a good tool :D, but i thought it was around in the next 3months like december ish. the clock says july 2016 is that correct?

You might get some idea about the market sentiment regarding block halving at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1171180.0

Meh people thought the price of LTC would skyrocket or double at the halving, and what happened? Not much, the price is still mostly sticked to the BTC.

So when the BTC halving happen, i'm pretty sure anything under the S7 undervolted will get dropped for the average American seller. For me Anything under S5 or S3 undervolted will drop out.

Roughly.  As that site shows, the halving occurs exactly every 210,000 blocks.  Blocks can be found slower/faster than intended depending on whether the network hash rate decreases or increases.  Right now it's increasing, so while the site estimates July 26th, it'll probably shift over to earlier in July as things progress.

I will always have at least a miner going for the love of it.   How big I am able to go though no one will know till we are closer.   

At current price a lot of gear is going to be hard to run without really cheap electricity.   But I have hope that something will happen to make it work for hobby miners.

Does anyone expect big bitcoin mining operations to slowly dissipate if price stays the same for a while after the halving?

with simple math you can verify that any miners around 0.05 or less can take profit even at $70 per btc, so with the next halving they are still there with a small gain

for example 1 farm with 1k antminer s5 can earn around 10 btc day($2300), while consuming only 590 kw/h x 0.05 x 24 = $708, with the halving there is still around 400+ in profit every day

and all this without counting that the new s7 has a double efficiency...

Way too many variables to tell at THIS point.
The biggest one is "how much will diff increase by then", followed closely by "what will bitcoin price be by then".

 Trying to figure profitability after the halfing based on where those numbers are NOW is stupid.


LTC is a much smaller market, so it was easier for it to move a lot - and as it happens it DID more than double before the halfing, then dropped back down a little. It's STILL quite a bit higher than what it was 3 months before the halfing.

 I expect bitcoin will see a bump too, but not nearly as much of one.

Some miners will get out of business, that's for sure. Those will be the ones that are now mining on very narrow margins. I don't expect that there will be amazingly a lot of people that will drop out after halving if the prices stay the same.

Difficulty is very high at the moment. Last 10 days it kept raising. Actually we even have to much of the hashrate at the moment, we don't need this much for our network to stay well protected. This just shows you that mining is still very profitable for majority of the miners, otherwise, hashrate wouldn't be going up like this.

I come out of the mining game long ago. The only time I mine now days if cloud mining and also mining alt coins that come out. getting to point not worth it for bitcoin mining due to the cost of energy used. If energy prices where good in UK and equipment was cheaper it would be a lot better. Been burned in a few cloud mining places.  At the halving I can see a lot of people trying to push that last little bit of profit before switching off units or taking them to other cryptos that are starting out.

It's really hard to say. The classic economic assumption is that known future events are already priced in by the market. That would mean the halving has no effect on price.

But it will strongly affect mining activity.

Please extend statement Tupsu.
In my opinion, neither technical analysis of the BTC/USD chart or future mining does not justify the sharp drop in the BTC price as you suggest.
In my opinion mining after halving will bring income. Everyone has to simulate it for his own use, taking into consideration: the difficulty, the BTC price and the price of electricity.

Demand and supply are not always balanced.

A small example for Hashnest S5 market.

Shop  Price: 367.0 USD(1.58579611฿)  Stock: 627

Market Price :   1xS5=1 BTC

After the big panic selling  S5 price with every day only  go down. 
The reason is not only panic.
S5 is still very profitable  in Hashnest. Depending on the day Maintenance from total payout  is 52-55%

But the S5 price only drops.  Because supply is greater than demand. The same can also happen very easily with BTC.

Generally Tupsu you're right. But you made a mistake by confusing a BTC/USD couple with what is happening in the mining equipment market.
The collapse of the BTC/USD course took place in 2013-2014 and the current situation is quite different from that. We are located just at a different time.

I plan to keep mining into the halving and beyond.

I'm dropping out of mining in the next month entirely. Will be running a full node for as long as I'm able.

readingfrom whats people wrote aove, might be better to drops out for awhile

I already dropped out the mining game early 2014. If prices go back up at the block reward half and its a good enough price to sustain mining I might get back into it. IF prices stay where they are then a lot of company's are going to be out of business and closing shop as some are already doing so. July 2016 is the time of next block half so we got plenty of time till that happens but sure is going to be interesting to see what becomes of price and also mining equipment.

In order to decide whether to invest in BTC or not, one must disregard the BTC price.Why?If BTC price will increase and mining will be appealing again why don't you just invest in BTC?

Home mining will end in a near future, predictable time will be arounf halving.

Will I quit mining? No.

Why? Scale economics.

That means that the price of such hardware will be really low. This will maybe even increase the power of the big China farms which have dirt cheap electricity and which will buy cheap S5. And thus the centralization of the hashes will continue  :(.

The only thing is normally these big farms do not order a bunch of used gear.  Normally they order direct from manufacture, they will get a good discount when buying a data center worth.

I still plan on mining after halving.  Just lots of variables we don't know that I need to know before deciding how big twords then.

I would actually like this to be the case, but a funny thought would be that all those big farms breaking down and leaving difficulty through the roof and untouchable by basement miners.

I agree.

I also agree with the people who say that there are too many variables. When looking that far ahead, at best you can stay as informed as possible by keeping up with bitcoin news, world finance news and by using your "gut" feeling.

I believe too that the hash rate will have steep jumps in the next few months. My spreadsheet estimate is 9.5% per month as an average.

Bitcoin value will not double after halving, there are too many coins owned by such a very few people that they will likely cause a strong downward pressure on the price. Home miners will slowly and permanently drop out of the market as no new technology gets released to them long term and more centralization will occur. Satoshi knew this and wrote about it on a mailing list in 2009.

"At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware."

https://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09964.html

At this point in time, my plan is to keep my S7's permanently and keep them turned on until they die. That plan may very likely change, but at this time I think that if I am unable to afford the newest miners in the future or they become unavailable to the end user. I want to be mining, for as long as I can purely because I believe in Bitcoin and believe that one day our children, and grandchildren would shake their heads at the thought that we didn't run our miners because it was "unprofitable". Because as coins get lost forever and the utility of Bitcoin increases, so will the price and just being able to have 1 coin at that time would be amazing.

I am in this for the coins. When the day comes that Bitcoin value is everything people wished it to be, I want to have a tonne of them.

If or when the day comes where we enter an unprecedented global depression, I know what I want to be holding in my hand when people finally lose faith in the Federal Reserve and the system of toxic greed that is misplaced corporate power, and the politicians paid for by them.

Certainly not a piece of paper saying I "own" the rights to possibly imaginary gold locked away somewhere I will never see.

I want my Bitcoin wallets, and anonymity.

I'm out of mining for the moment but intend to buy a 21 bitcoin computer to see what they have to offer...

I think there are some possibilities there worth exploring...

I can say i just sold my S4 & C1 miners for US$1300 which is about what i paid for them both including delivery (After using coupons) So i broke even on them. I had a lot of fun over the last 12 months with them...

Couldnt really justify the S7 with the current Australian dollar... Its $2700 australian delivered... A little too much...

Ill sit tight with the coin i got, See what 21 has to offer & if someone else comes up with a better miner cheaper i might use some coins to buy back in..

Good luck to u all

I'm not even sure what you would want to do with it. It kind of sound like a gimmick machine, it doesn't do anything special, is expensive and its performance is most likely as limited as how vaguely they talk about their own product.

Basically, what do you even want to do with that?

Pus about $300 import tax

Ouch

That is a insane amount I can see why it would not work.   Anywhere else selling a S4 and C1 for 1300 would have been a grand slam.

You might look into hosting centers in the future.    It would be much much cheaper on import tax.  Although it will not help on usd to Australian dollar.

The mining process is set in stone and mining does not "create" inflation, it is essential to process transactions.   Once the halving happens, it will push out inefficient miners.  I would assume anything over 1Gh.s per watt will go away if not already.

I think the S5 will remain online for people and datacenters that pays 2-3cent/kWh, but other than that, even the S7 at that point might become soso if any hardware from all the concurring companies will produce, for most home miners.

so you plan to drop the game with the next halving? i know you have 100tera or something, dunno if it is made of s5 or s7, if the first, you can maybe sell those and buy the new s7 and remain in the game for a longer time

I am in a different position because we own our data-center and are situated in the cheapest power location on the planet.  Our math is a little more forgiving but we will continue to hosting the most efficient hardware as possible.  What I see is another way on consolidation leading up too and after the consolidation.

-D

How many blocks have been found by home miners in the last year?  Any?

Difficult to tell.

Large pools like Antpool and F2Pool have plenty of users who are home miners, but that can't easily be divined.
Solo pools might seem like they'd be a good indication, but then there's people renting hash rate from a large hash rental provider and pointing that at the solo pool, so that's no good either.
Unidentified mining addresses might be another, e.g. 1MFsp2tx, but as they've had 5 blocks in the past month, that's a pretty high hash rate 'home' miner and more likely just an as of yet unidentified pool or business.
1KVcqebR only has one mined block (mid-August) apparently off of a ConiumumServ pool server.  Can't know for sure, but that could be a home miner.
1jKSjMLn "/mined by ck/" ought to be a 'home' miner :)

So in terms of "Any?" we know that there are at least some.  But how many, exactly, your guess is as good as mine.

Sound correct, most home miner mine at solo pools, because its still advantageous and less management. You also get monitoring capability with the accepted share rate. With the truly solo lottery kind of blocks found, i think we're looking at less than 1 per 10 000 blocks.