Bitcoin Forum

According to the bitcoin clock bitcoin will drop to 12.5 btc per block in late July of 2016.

How will miners react to this?

What will it take to keep miners mining?

What if miners in large numbers decide not to mine?

if a large amount of miners just stop mining, the fee would go up and give more incentive to the miners, this bringing them back. :P

^ and less bitcoins being mined overall, so even greater price per bitcoin. That's a great incentive.


I doubt miners will stop in large numbers. Less rewards means less supply of bitcoins so maybe higher price in the end.

Our network security is = the $ value a miner could earn from the block rewards plus transaction fees vs the $ value they could get paid for attacking the network.
As they get paid less and less the option to attack the network becomes potentially more profitable .

So if the price of bitcoins stays the same then you would see further consolidation of the mining pools and hardware in large farms, likely in china where power is cheap if not free.
This makes large chunks of the mining world vulnerable to gov control, or natural disasters like floods.  
The day will come when block rewards will be minimal and unless bitcoin gos up in value by a tremendous amount or transaction fees rise by a lot then the security of the network will be weak.

It will become much cheaper to attack the network. Right now the network is paying for itself threw inflation, 99% of the cost to secure the network comes from block rewards.

Without higher transaction fees the people controlling mining hardware will have less incentive to play by the rules regardless of mining difficulty, a point will be reached where breaking the rules will pay more, even if its just a short term gain.

Sorry for so many edits

That sounds scary. I hope it does not happen. I would like to see bitcoin survive in the longterm.

in my prediction 30% of miners decide not to mine and waiting till the bitcoin price go up or until they can make profit with it

Context seems to be off on this one. The hard coded supply of all bitcoins is 21000000 (20999999.7 afaik) and it wouldn't go lower than that. The only thing that's gonna be decreased are the rewards per block but not the supply. Rewards per block != supply.

The price increase over the last month seems to be factoring in this.
Supply will be cut. So we can expect some further price appreciation.  :)

lets say it costs $5000 to mine a block based on total hash power and average electric, meaning miners would happily sell their reward at $260/btc to net a $60 profit..

if the difficulty keeps rising.. the cost to mine it increases, and as such the price naturally rises.
then at the block reward halving.. they suddenly have the same costs (estimating $300+) but only half as many btc rewarded.. thus to break even they either stop mining and let others take a bigger share, or logically hold out selling their coin until its over $600 to breakeven/profit..

but then again most miners dont sell on the public exchanges and as such the exchanges value does not accurately reflect resource cost->sell of producing new bitcoin.

eg
most american markets are completely separate from logic and bitcoin production costs.. best to watch the chinese markets and respond appropriately if their prices move too far from american prices

These are all just speculations. Everyone has their own opinion on this and this is just someones opinion. I personally don't think that Bitcoin is going to drop a substantial amount in the near future.

There will be less dumps from miners to cover their electrical fees and the price could rise slightly. Mining would still be overall profitable for most miners with cheaper electricity as most has already made ROI by then. I project that the difficulty may rise very slowly or even decrease.

Miners will keep on mining if there's a profit to it, if not, a part of them will shut their miners down. After that, difficulty would drop, and miners would mine once again.
There's no chance large number of miners won't mine, and even if they did, it wouldn't make a difference, it would just be more profitable for the ones who would keep mining.

It would make a difference if a large percentage of miners suddenly stop. Firstly, the blocks will be slowed down and it would take more time for difficulty to readjust. Secondly, if a large percentage of miners (>30%)  does stop near the end of the period, difficulty would take at least 1 additional period to readjust and make it profitable again.

There will be much less to the moon and to the depth  :P
In fact the prediction of recent price ditches can be seen clearly and the miners will be in most profit. The holders holing coins will start selling them and will make quick profits.
Actually no one can predict the outcomes as bitcoin is un predictable.

Right. Maybe I shouldn't have said supply. I wasn't talking about the total supply of bitcoins. I meant that at the time of the reward halving there would be less bitcoins being mined and so less being sold by miners and flooding the market.

Certainly before this event the big pump happens, where can be earn but miners will mine as usual, they have no choice.

BTC price ll go up much before that due to people expecting less supply as a result of halving. Miners ll be fine, traders ll be fine, holders ll be fine.

Get more BTC while u still can.

Are you sure about that? I still have much to learn about bitcoin but wouldn't it fail since there would be no one securing the transactions?

It wouldn't be great for anyone. If mining does stop, Bitcoin blocks won't be mined or at least at a slower rate and it takes much longer for difficulty readjustment and profits won't be better till it readjust. It would also be more susceptible to 51% attacks. That being said, even with the halving of blocks, people would still have cheap electricity and not a huge portion would stop mining.

price will increase i'm 99% sure about this, so this will prevent miners from abandoning the scene, even the small one, hell right now there is already more profit to be made

let alone another increase in value

It may come to be that it is not profitable anymore for some miners to continue mining - especially maybe smaller, solo miners or those without access to cheap electricity and efficient hardware. Mining itself will not stop.

then how can we get our transactions to be confirmed if no one is mining for the network? IMO all transactions will be forgotten by the network in few days if its not confirmed so bitcoin will eventually die if that happens

My guess is that alot of miners will quickly run away, they've made the profit they wanted. But due to this, the transaction fees would rise to something like 0.0005-0.001 per transaction. But due to the low amount of miners (lower difficulty) and higher transaction fees, the miners will quickly flood back in. Probably not as much as before, but more than straight after the halving. But due to this, the tx fees will lower again, and miners will quit. again. Thus continues the circle of greed.

Or, maybe the miners will read this post, and no one will leave the mining game. One way or another, the thriving non-miner community will stay on top of the world.


But most of the home miners will quit.

I think he meant that, if the big miners stop mining with their crazy huge rigs, the difficulty would go down allowing people with lesser hardware to mine more Bitcoin.

I feel the current rise of the price has to do with the upcoming halving. Which will bring the new floor to USD 400-450.

Goodbye 230

This is pretty much my hope.

I think this could be the prequel to the 1/2 ing.

I believe bitcoin will survive the halving and long there after. I am going to stay invested. I think the ceo who said that bitcoin will be dead soon because no government will put up with it is a clown. More than likely bitcoin is a threat to his job.

The same thing that happened last halving, nothing special, business as usual...

Most likely, there will be a runup starting about a month before the halfing.
I'm guessing it will go up 60-70%, then drift back down a couple months after the halfing to about 50% more than 2 months before the halfing.

 At that point, anything older than the "current generation" will have become unprofitable even with VERY CHEAP electric and a lot of hashpower will start dropping out - but I suspect there will be plenty of "current generation" hashpower on line by then, so the diff likely won't drop much if at all from the 2-months-before point to the 2-months-after point.

 I DO expect to see a very short-term diff drop after the halfing, then close to stagnation for a while - kind of like the first half of this year but more so.


 If the current price surge lasts longer than I think, and the runup gets BitCoin pricing above $600 or so, the halfing won't have much effect at all as older-gen units will still be profitable (barely). The diff probably WILL still flatten out though, and eventually folks with higher electric costs will go unprofitable and shut down older gear.

The last halving happened in 2012. At that time, the demands wasn't big and the mining competition wasn't big either. But now, many still have to sell them for electrical fees. Some claimed to have kept a portion of it in Bitcoins from the mining profits. Since many would have ROIed by now, I can't say about how much the halving would impact prices but I doubt the prices would skyrocket.

The price will be safe @ 400 usd I expect, else a lot of ppl will have to turn their miners off..

Did mining profits decrease?

Yes, they went from 50 BTC per block to 25 BTC per block.

BTC to the moon on halving !
That's the way to go !
Hahaha

LOL, that much I knew. I guess I should have asked the question differently.

How did miners compensate for the halving?

Well back when it happened there were no asic's    and the price stumbled  we had a - diff or two.

Then avalon came out with the first asic  and we had 2 spikes  in price.

The march april 2013 spike  ..  I made more money then I did from aug 2012 to feb 2013.

My guess is we ramp up in price to the 350-500 level  vs the older 230 level. 

Home mining will never die simply because of heating value during the winter.

I have a few winter locations that use electrical heaters like this

http://www.sylvane.com/delonghi-comfortemp-radiator.html?s_cid=cse_bingshopping

so how is this not a perfect place for an s-3 or two?

Nope, that's the revenue, not profits.  :)

price is already 50% higher, now that we are still many months away, a 100% increase is more than possible by the time the halving kick in, this is good so the miners will not leave, and keep securing the network

There are really too many unknowns and it's still way to early to tell. Normally price should increase and we should find ourselves at the equilibrium again as the mining reward will drop by half, from 50 to 25 BTCs per block. So this increase in price will make for the people that are going to drop out of the mining game because of the lower reward.

But we already see a big increase in price compared to $230 levels, which is good for the miners. Really many unknowns and we will have to wait and see how this will play out exactly!

All of my S7 works as usual. At least 8 hours a day and on weekends , because I have a great price  for Night electricity.
More probably 24/7 mining continues , which means  € 3,500 on electricity bills per month.

My simplistic prediction is that after the halving, the network will produce about 1800 Bitcoins per day......  :)