Bitcoin Forum

So yesterday the difficulty was raised up 16%. The PPS rate goes down significantly. I earn much less PPS per day, not mentioned of instability of pools due to networks, DDOS attack, server ... Pool's uptime will never be 100%

If the difficulty goes up once again after 10 - 15 days, I think that I can earn about 2 - 2.5 USD per days which is unable to cover the expense (electricity and hardware only)

What do you think about it?

From my very limited knowledge of Bitcoins and the methods of obtaining them (I know of FPGA and ASIC mining, but hell if I can put a rig together), I'd guess that it's only going to get harder. Once ASIC units start actually being produced and become mainstream in the bitcoin world, the difficulty is going to skyrocket and GPU miners will probably be left in the dust.

I don't think their is a clear answer yet. These last two weeks have shaken up the entire structure and butterflylabs will be putting in their rigs soon but their competitors already have theirs in place. It's all a dice game, I would say don't invest what you are not willing to lose and make the best of it. 

QFT. and all the asic rig are sold out and pre-order are atleast 6months+
and i live in SouthEast Asia, which make it even more difficult to obtain one.

I talked to the owner of butterfly labs today and he informed me you buy a rig today you would have it by July? So not sure what you are saying. I know there are a lot of folks that are pissed at him because he keeps pushing the date, i know it says end of April 2013 and he didn't really confirm that either. Found out just on accident its down the road from where i dwell lol

last time i check, he updated that they still have problem bcos the rig (i think it was the cpu or smtg) is outputting more heat/electricity than it was intended

I am curious to see how that changes and dominates the market or if people really don't invest and it changes the whole climate a little bit. I would risk 270 usd just to see if it can really do 4500 Mhash/s but i wouldnt give it anymore than that then ride the wave

It sounds like mining is less secure than buying bitcoins and playing ups and downs at Mt Gox.

Well, to get started mining most of people pay more or less than 1000 USD to buy VGA (~1000MH/s). However that investment yields about 3.5 - 4.2 USD per day in revenue (not profit) if BTS/USD is 85 - 90 as of today.

I really think that BTC trading can bring more profit than GPU mining. If ASIC miners joins the board, GPU miners should quit the BTC game

Yes the difficulty will skyrocket soon. But also note that the price of BTC has jumped back from it's $50 bottom. This will also affect mining profitablility probably much more then 16% diff raise will.

the more time that goes on, the more ASICs will be introduced and will push GPU mining out of the way

You are right. I hope that the exchange rate between USD and BTC will be higher than 94 USD to keep the mining revenue the same. Because if the exchange rate is about 80 - 90 USD/BTC, I earn 0.5 - 1 USD less per day.

There's a good chance the fiat exchange rate will continue to increase (on average) faster than the difficulty for a while. But once ASICs are not supply-limited, we should expect mining to be no more profitable than direct BTC trading (as digicoin suggested).

Just stop mining if you have to pay for electricity, eventually you will lose, to the people with free electricity (and there are many).

The other option is to look into the other cryptos such as LTC as the profitability is 15% or so higher then BTC at the moment though the price has stalled but the network hashing has gone up dramatically

You could always look at the data at http://www.coinchoose.com (http://www.coinchoose.com) or http://dustcoin.com (http://dustcoin.com) and pick an alt coin to mine to squeeze out as much as you can now.  In addiiton, you might want to look at https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172121.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=172121.0)

Wait until the chinese get into the game... I can see the difficulty level skyrocket 10,000x

Sadly, it's true the difficulty levels are going way too high in a small amount of time.

I think it's time to offer alternatives to mining to the miners. In my opinion there is a market for distributed computing power that could be realized with bitcoins. Please see my proposal in this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179723.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=179723.0)

I think the people selling their ASIC miners for 25k-40k right now are prob smart.  I agree that the difficulty is going to absolutely skyrocket.  Especially if prices of BTC start to up really high. 

yeah difficulty will skyrocket, 10M by end of the month.

Yeah everyone's on the bandwagon now.

I've got a friend who's just bought a mining computer from America.

That shows how big bitcoin is.

I didn't even think that any of my friends would ever hear of bitcoins let alone mine!!

It would be interesting to see the effects of ASICs.

I am in for a 25GH Single SC, and my main concern is getting break even. That is all I want first.


BFL Josh said something about them ahving "only" 75k chips, with each chip at about 800MH/s

SO this is probably a fun reality: 75.000 times 800mh/s equals a hashing power of about 60000GH, aka 60TH hitting the market.
I doubt the others are that far yet, although I see some FPGA developers chipping in creating more power.

If we would suggest that 30-40% of people nowadays are still GPU miners and they had to stop, that would make about 20-25GH/s of Hash rate right now.

Let us say Avalon Ships, increases the next batches with another 20GH/s. We would end up at... 80-100GH/s entering the market in bulk, with about 20-25GH/s leaving it, because their electricity bill won't be paid anymore.

Until GPU miners have recouped their sold cards, we would be at an increase of about 80GH/s this year. This would double the hashing power. Bitcoins are given out by a pretty much fixed margin. The difficulty would therefore have to reflect this change EQUALLY.

Meaning, that if you had 1% in the market before, and you have 1% of the hashing power now, nothing changes. What changes, and that is an interesting way of showing evolution in non-biological sense (red queen theory): If you want to keep making the same amount of Bitcoin until the next cut off, you need to keep adding hashing power in linear proportion to the overall network has increase.

More or less. So yes, of course it becomes less profitable. What you have to calculate is the following: The cost of equipment necessary and its time until it breaks even. If this timeframe becomes too big, it sucks. If this timeframe to break even stays in the 3 month range, like right now: Who gives a damn if the network gets bigger. You just need to keep ahead and keep adding a well calculated portion of your profits to stay at the same percentage of network hashing power to stay profitable.

Anyone still mining Bitcoin with a standard system is wasting their time and money, that ship sailed long ago. The smartest thing to do if you still want to mine is to jump on younger currencies like PPCoin or Terracoin if you don't think they're scams. But really, SHA-256 is a dead end, once ASICs are commonplace, all SHA-256 currencies will be out of the hands of regular people, the best bet is to jump on Scrypt based currencies like Litecoin, they are ASIC immune, and you can still make money with a decent rig. Mining though is limited anyway, it's probably better just to drop some Fiat on Litecoins/Bitcoins directly through an exchange and trade on the market, you're more liable to earn a profit that way.

The link I posted above to the other thread here contains a program that not only automatically switches to the most profitable coin, automatically converts back to BTC....Freicoin is up over 200% of the profitability of BTC right now with Litecoin and PPCoin marginally more profitable.

You could also buy some chips from avalon: http://store.avalon-asics.com/?page_id=9605 (http://store.avalon-asics.com/?page_id=9605). Ofcourse you need to buy 10k chips at a time and build your own pcb and software etc  :-\.

For most of us that is obviously not an option financially and technically but there is a DIY project underway here on the forum which uses the avalon chips: DIY PCB with AVALON - [Proposed BOM V1] (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=161715.0) with the chips being bought by one member and then distibuted [ANN] Avalon ASIC chip distribution (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=177827.0)

Any money I was going to spend on a mining rig I've since spent on ASICMINER Shares.

The payments are nice so far, But I wonder if in the long run they are only going to go up or down.

Not if you are friedcat.

Such a pity.