Bitcoin Forum

I think that ASIC's are seeing delays and are going to hit for at least a couple of weeks after the reward drop has a silver lining.  Since the reward drop occurring while ASIC's are not in the mix, we can get a good picture of how the BTC network reacts to the reward drop alone.  Will it drive some people out?  Lower the difficulty?  Drive up the price?  We should know in a few weeks.

If ASIC's arrived while the network was still in the midst of the reward drop change, it would be impossible to understand if changes we see were brought about by the ASIC's or the reward drop.  The inverse is true as well, if the network has time to work it's way through any impacts the reward drop may have before anyone starts mining with ASIC's then we have to opportunity to watch ASIC's impact on the network without any influence from the reward drop.

Don't forget the 2012 end-of-times flood.

Which reminds me, since the world gonna end and all, send me your bitcoins. I'll put in a good word for ya.

I concur.  The halving and ASICs occurring at the same time could have been quite a mess.

The week following the halving should be very interesting indeed.

Good thing for whom is the question.

It's good for people with an academic interest in bitcoin. It's incredibly bad for people who plunked thousands of dollars down 5-6 months ago.
On a grander scale, it is neutral and doesn't matter either way.

Good for my fpga's that havet yet reached 100% RoI
Kinda bad for my gpu's at my electric rates the off chanse of breakage is not covered with what remains of profit after the reward halving.
Bad for my Asic order.

I guess atleast I have my risk decentralized ?

I guess that's a point for some people.

Personally, I think it would be interesting to see what happens at halving... and then again at ASIC release. We can expect a quick crash and even quicker recovery when ASICs hit... but halving may slowly drive the price or may do nothing at all...

I would also prefer if these two massive changes did not coincide. It would make things much simpler.

I think it's a good thing. It allows me to get more of my ROI from my video cards. Had the ASICs been released sooner, my video cards would've been put out of work.

Great points of benefit

Yup, I'll get more profit from my GPUs.  As far as I'm concerned I'd be happy as a pig in slop if ASICs got delayed another 6 months, lol.

You're kidding right? Or do you have free power? With the reward halving - I am shutting down. Use the bitcoin profitability calculator and see if you are actually making money after Wednesday with 25 BTC:

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/ (http://bitcoinx.com/profit/)

I have free power. If anyone has a couple rigs they want me to host for them. I'll do a 50/50 split :)

Yeah, unless more than half the people shut down then you won't be making more profit.  If you're counting on people dropping out and there being a big difficulty drop, don't.  Difficulty drops take forever to hit compared to how quickly difficulty can ramp up.  You normally get difficulty adjustments about every 2 weeks, if half the people shut down, difficulty will still be the same until the next reset, but since half as many people are hashing, it'll take twice as long to get there.

We just adjusted to 3.43 Million difficulty about a day or so ago with a network hashing rate of ~ 24-25 TH.  If nothing changes we'll see the next adjustment around 12/10.  When the reward drops we'll still have 1680 blocks left to find before the difficulty drop.  If the network suddenly drops to 12-13 TH, it'll probably take double the time it normally would to find those 1680, or 20 minutes a block.  Calculate that out and we're talking 23.3 days from that point to finish those remaining blocks or somewhere around 12/21 or 12/22.  That whole time you will be getting half as much per block, and the blocks are going to be longer in coming.

Well if difficulty drops half way then wouldn't we be making the same as before?

I think if BTC price/difficulty ratio history were to apply here it will take two difficulty periods before people actually shut down. I think ASICS will be out the door before we see the total effect of block halving.

If I look at that calculator I see ~$0.15kw/hr power consumers roughly breaking even. Correct me if im wrong. But maybe somethink it is worth it to heat their home.

IMHO it isn't good for the BTC  community to shrink.

Your reward drop will happen immediately and thus your rate of earning will drop immediately, but any changes to difficulty will happen slowly. Even if you think the price will rise or difficulty will drop, it probably doesn't make any sense to mine for the next few weeks unless you have free power.

Yes, but your income would double! = no change from reward drop if half the miners stop mining!

Edit: Hum, I stand corrected, seems GPU miners are still mining, deepbit hashing power didn't budge at all!?

At $0.11 USD/kWh and it being winter in Colorado I am still mining away on GPUs. My apartment stays at a comfortable temperature and with current difficulty and rewards I'm still making a few hundred dollars above electricity costs.

Something interesting.. Litecoin/BTC pricing doesn't appear to have budged. According to http://www.litecoinpool.org/calc if I were mining litecoins right now I'd earn roughly the same BTC as I was earning prior to the reward split.

Ok, seems I was right, revenue per block stays the same or better it seems?! So that must mean about half of miners stopped?! It's increasing block by block so happy days for FPGA!

This is so weird, must mean all miners on deepbit use FPGA or keep GPU going?!

But block speed should be half and its been ~3 hours and 28 blocks mined so that doesent make sense? Can somebody please explain whats going on?

Good point OP.  Was thinking the same.  This way even though it goes against my profiting feelings, at least everyone who has an ASIC will be starting on fair ground at 25 coin blocks.  I know people anticipated earning during the 50 coin blocks but that time is now passed.

Even if ASICs are 2-3 weeks out or so, we may still be able to get an indication of how many people are dropping simply due to network power or times solving a block.  Not 100% accurate by any means but perhaps good enough.

Random variance. Block 210041 was ~39 minutes long.

Later than expected by whom?  Probably a year ago when I was pondering things, I figured that ASIC would be probably be between 2014-ish and never.  I figured that there were probably ways of burning hard-copies of FPGA, but that they probably would not be particularly optimal in either price or performance.  I knew (and know) close to zero about the technology however.

One thing I have and do take an interest in are the various 'free energy' machines.  How they have sprung up and faded away, how they have been marketed, and the personality types who tend to get swindled.  The little bits of marketing I've seen associated with ASIC mining gear reminds me of the 'free energy' stuff a lot.  The main difference between the victims is that in the case of 'free energy' they seem to be of the naive do-good variety; in the case of Bitcoin they seem to be often characterizable as greedy assholes.

Hm, ok stats have been corrected, I now earn half.. :(

So that means no GPUs have been taken offline...

LTC network hashrate have already doubled but the estimated next difficulty of BTC is still higher than current.

Probably the ones who have "free electricity" have overclocked their GPUs to the max or the BTC pools are very lucky lately.


In fact, the GPUs of my 1.7gh/s rig have already found new homes in my 2 sons and nephew's gaming rigs.

Seems difficulty is exploding?!

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/)

Hm, so GPUs are NOT taken offline (even though unprofitable, at least the hashing power is not going down).

What could cause this increase in hashing power, ASIC?

Exploding? It appears to be growing at 0.5% per day give or take a bit. That's pretty typical for the last couple of months.

Maybe miners are playing chicken. They know if the other guy quits it will make them more profitable so no one wants to pull the plug.

Not really true... or even partially true.

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/growth.png

Only passed ~.5% in Sept and lasted a little over a month, after which the rate of growth has been steadily decreasing from Mid-Oct until Late Nov (where it was down to about .35%/day) when there was a sudden reversal and seeming surge of new hardware right around block halving.

The reasons remain mysterious, super-coincidental crazy network-luck, miners turning on to grab the last 50block and forgetting to turn off, asics, who knows? But it definitely bucked the trend right at halving, when many people have claimed to be switching off. Mysterious.

Playing chicken only works if your not loosing money. Heating is a good argument of course; until loss becomes larger than difference of heat between regular electric heater and GPU, and thats a long way away = summer, just like the 12.5 difficulty increase needed for me to stop mining with FPGA.

I think most GPU miners are speculative in their loss now, they are so certain of BTC longterm success that they rather keep paying electricity, at a net loss today, to create BTC!

I think this graph says it somewhat better:

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/growth-10k.png

Largest spike in the past 2 months at halving. Looks like whatever caused it is dying down now though.

Im still playing chicken. But every day I wake up asking myself why. Im trying to convince myself to just take it all offline, but I cant seem to do it yet.

Get out and buy BTC with your dollars.  If you think ASIC's are coming at all soon, you'll soon be outgunned by not only all the buyers of ASIC's... but the ASIC companies themselves mining with their stock.  Imagine if AMD put all their unsold GPU's to work mining BTC?  Imagine if for every GH you buy from some ASIC manufacturer, they create 3 and use 2 to mine for themselves.  This is what you'll soon be up against.

the only benefit is getting the btc now and paying the electricity cost later, but at a loss it is mostly worth just buying btc with usd instead

Check again (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/) people are certainly removing GPUs from mining as of lately. It should be reflected in a couple blocks by a *slight* decrease in difficulty.

But you don't get your BTC now.  You get them later, in diminishing amounts, and you have to pay for the electricity in constant amounts with diminishing returns.

If you buy BTC now, you just get them.  Done deal.  Nothing further needed.

I didn't know there would be a 2 month delay, I wish the ASICs would've been released before the block halving.

And another month to go at the least.

42 days minimum

No, I'm not kidding.

I have a HTPC that's on all the time anyways so I don't count the "idle" motherboard power usage as that part of the power consumption would be on my monthly bill, bitcoin mining or not, houses 2 cards.  I have an atom board with 1 core disabled, only uses 20W, have 2 cards on that one.

The calculator is roughly in line with my quick match calculations:

Coins per 24h at these conditions   0.1418 BTC
Power cost per 24h   0.73 USD
Revenue per day   1.92 USD
Less power costs   1.19 USD
System efficiency   2.79 MH/s/W
Mining Factor 100 at the end of the time frame   0.17 USD/24h@100MHash/s
Average Mining Factor 100   0.19 USD/24h@100MHash/s
Power cost per time frame   89.41 USD
Revenue per time frame   215.94 USD
Less power costs   126.52 USD




Also, where I live (Canada) it's winter now, and it's cold here, temps in winter typically range from -5C to 2C on average. So the heat generation is not wasted, so it's profitable to mine AND I get a lower heat bill too (which is more profit, though harder to measure).

That's not it at all.

Some of us were actually smart and did research before we got involved in mining.

I for example run some fpgas, and a bunch of 5770 (most power friendly mining card there is if you configure it correctly).

My incomes gone from ~2btc per day to ~1.2 btc in recent weeks. My power bill for my whole place offset by solar (which is junk in winter) but right now I'm heating via mining and paying about $90 per month on an electric bill, which is only slightly more than I'd pay for firewood or gas heating.

Price of btc is still rising, and should continue to rise until the release of ASIC. By my speculation, it's going to stabalize around 15-16 usd per before march (which is when I think asic's are landing).

Hum, no. A 7970 beats the 5770 any day in terms of Mhash/Joule. It does 3.1 out of the box. 4+ when undervolted/underclocked.

If you think your 5770 beats that, you must be incorrectly measuring its power consumption (eg. you measure at the wall and only measure the difference between idle and load, and incorrectly assume the card draws 0W at idle).

It's possible I screwed the the math.

I'm showing a difference of 42 watts between idle and loaded - with a single 5770. The cards limited to 75w (per ATI). A 7970 is ~200 watts difference between idle and load. (and limited to 250 per ATI). Are you getting 600 mh/s out a 7970? If not then my 5770s are out preforming you and using less power.

Yes, me and many people get 650-700 Mhash/s per 7970.

7970 is 32nm. 5770 is 40nm. The 32nm chip is naturally more power efficient.

Also you made the exact mistake I predicted: incorrectly assuming the 5770 draws 0W at idle therefore you think mining only takes 42W. The 5770 actually draws 18W at idle per its specs. That means your card as a whole is closer to ~60W when mining.

Taking into account this 18W baseline load is important when comparing different cards. Or else, imagine if a card was so inefficient that it would draw 100W when idle and 105W when under load. People would be claiming that mining only takes 5W, therefore making it the most efficient card of all!

Argue it anyway you like - you're still incorrect. Measuring at the wall with 3x 5770 and then measuring the same machine with a 7970 instead... will clearly show which is ahead.

per specs maximum draw for a 5570 is 108W. Lets use that number. My cards (which are drawing ~75 are getting over 200mh/s).

5770 - 108w @ 200 mh/s.

7970 - ~300w @ (lets say) 600 mh/s.

Now based on 'worst case' numbes the 7970 is slightly ahead.

The difference between the idle draw on the 5770 and the 7970 is 3 watts. Also idle doesn't matter, since you can't mine while idle. It's fine, rest assured that your 7970 will probably resell for a few hundred bucks once asics hit... while I'm losing slightly more money if I can't resell mine. Due to them only costing 1/6th of the price.

These numbers show I was correct! - the 7970 is more power efficient (in fact a lot more because your numbers are out of whack... at 600 Mhash/s the 7970 draws ~200W -- I measured mine at 193W with a clamp meter). Not sure why you say I was "incorrect"  ::)


Yes but when you ignore the 18W at idle for the 5770, you ignore 17% of its total power draw,
and when you ignore the 15W at idle for the 7970, you ignore 6% of its total power draw.
See the difference? 6% vs 17%? This is the significance I am talking about.

Huh? I have a single 7970 "space heater" running at 620MHs and drawing 275W at the wall for the entire system. Admittedly the other components are efficient (Sandy Bridge i5, SSD, 80 Plus platinum PS), but still ...

Welcome to the world of people tweaking numbers in order to save face in an online argument...

No.
We used maximum draw per ATI for both cards. Stock no tweaking the 7970 pulls down ~560.

You are still wrong. Because the official TDP of the 7970 is 250W. So even when looking at stock numbers, the 7970 is more efficient by ~21%:
- 7970: 560 Mhash/s at 250W = 2.24 Mhash/Joule
- 5770: 200 Mhash/s at 108W = 1.85 Mhash/Joule

If you move the argument to undervolted/fine-tuned settings, or to actual measured power, then the 7970 increases or keeps its lead because, as I pointed out, it doesn't even use close to 250W when mining (only ~200W).

My system:

1000 watt Kingwin PSU
AMD 965BE,3.4ghz,no OC
8 gig DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800)
3-320gig HDD's
5-80mm fans(lighted)
Visiontek 7970

While mining the whole system uses 380 watts,while idle 150 watts.I'm assuming my 7970 uses 230 watts max (1050mhz gpu clock,1265mhz memory clock=620mhs).

Still beats my 6970 xfire setup,680 watts for 820mhs.Glad I upgraded  ;D

My quad 7970 water cooled system uses 1KWhr at 2.6ghs, stock voltage, 1160 core, 170 mem.

That is 2.6 Mhash/Joule. Better than the 5770, as expected.

Yeah, just that one of the cards is lazy and has kept me lowering the core clock. I used to mine at 1175 mem with stock voltage, but it seems that it kept crashing and had to lower 5 mhz every 2 months or so. It is my second card, and blinks a red light on the PCB, what does this mean?

When i had my 7970 system mining it was producing 650Mh/s and only pulling 380watts at the wall. That included a gaming system setup (quad-core amd cpu, 6gb ram, optical drive, traditional HD, and a couple of heavy duty 120mm case fans). That number also counted my wireless router, cable modem, plugged in monitor but turned off and power strip. There is no way that card is pulling more than 250watts, and i'm sure it's closer to 220-230 at full load with simple low risk setting like 65% fan 1100gpu/950ram at 67degrees. I'm glad i made the right choice. That card will serve me for years to come if i keep it.