Bitcoin Forum

It usually doesn't go down, but only up.  Did a bunch of the miners decide to give up because the BTC price has stabilized?  Or do the miners think the price will drop soon?

Probably the difficulty rise outpriced a bunch of miners.

Hmm.  I didn't think the miners cared about price when they made their calculations. :D

 ::)

Anyway, it's been said over and over and over and over. Difficulty follows price. We had a huge huge huge jump in price, followed by tons of people buying tons of mining hardware, after that we had a huge huge huge fall in price, followed by a big jump in difficulty.

Explain why difficulty would continue to rise in that scenario? I'm sick of all the threads "I CALCULATED THAT GIVEN A 50% CONTINUAL INCREASE IN DIFFICULTY MINING WILL NOT BE PROFITABLE OMGOMGOMG" that stupidly kept appearing. Makes absolutely no sense. I want some apology threads, but sadly I'm sure I'll never see those.

Now, there is still room in the profitability cupboard for mining to grow, but I'm guessing that it will grow at a more conservative rate now that people don't see the magical money fountain spitting out as much gold and silver for nothing. Unless there's another price spike or media blitz I guess.

When it rises like this a lot of people who made 2-4-6 BTC a day won't like making 1-2-3 BTC a day. Sure they might still be making money but no one likes suddenly losing 40% of your return that won't be coming back.

I'd also guess CPU mining now loses you money so that probably dropped a few people out too.

CPU mining definitely is a losing proposition now. I did it as recently as 2 weeks ago, but when I put in a 3rd graphics card in my fastest rig, I needed the 60W for buffer room on my PSU. So I stopped CPU mining at that point (I was only making USD 0.20/day anyhow)

No doubt the latest difficulty push CPU mining into negative territory for *all* CPUs.

Matthew

It might have had something to do with bitcoins.lc having problems. Probably many miners there missed out on some mining time when the servers were down.

Some bad luck maybe..
Buy you can see diff is starting to go up again/

fighting overheating issues in DC3, some capacity went down temporarily.... I suppose I am not the only one with such issues... 28-30 C outside...

Regards,
Vladimir.

That's a fair point, as summer starts to roll in in force, we will definitely see a lot more people struggling with the idea of running a space heater 24/7.

scared people leave the mining market and put their cards on ebay...

Summer is a good stress-test for PUE=1.03 datacenters ;-)

Sorry, that was me.  I had to take my farm offline to try to run Crysis.

I bet you didn't get it on highest settings. Maybe a few more rigs with 4x6990 might do the trick.

Do you really have enough hashing power to affect the charts like that?  Or do I smell ego?  Just wondering, all I've seen are a few photos of some of your equipment and heard a few rumors.

It's hot in my mining datacenter too (bedroom).  Summer has officially hit southern california.  Had to back off my 605MH/s down to 600MH/s.  Did you guys see me drop the charts?   ;D

It's summer here in Las Vegas, NV and I get the feeling I'll be laughing at what most of you are calling "heat" wherever you're from. I've actually had to offload a couple nodes to the homes of friends and family to keep my apartment under 85F, it's pretty miserable really.

Yeah, it's been Summer here in Texas for at least 2 months now. Our summer (read: run A/C or die!) lasts about 6 months. It starts getting hot (more than 85) in late April, gets REAL hot during everyone else's summer, then stays pretty hot all the way to the beginning of October. And it's not brisk fall weather then, either. Oh, no no no. I've gotten mosquito bites on Thanksgiving, I kid you not! We don't even have to turn on the heat until January, and then "winter" lasts about 1 1/2 months.

Matthew

28-30C....................

It's been 36-38C here for weeks.

110F/43C today. That is all.

It's probably a dry heat though... :)

9% humidity. Feels GREAT as they're loading you in the back of the ambulance with heat stroke.

It's cooler here these days -- only hits 96 or 97.  A week or two ago we had highs of 105+

55 here, with a high of 66 today. (runs as other miners throw cans at him).

Indeed. Though that PUE is  annually averaged estimate. Surely it is a bit higher right now. And well... practice and theory are not always the same. As they say,   “no battle plan ever survives the first encounter with the enemy”.

lol u mad?
i'm in northern italy and right now (15:39 LT) there are 39°C in shadow, and it never dropped below 27°C in the last week...
85F is 30°.

I'm selling my mining farm, that's all.

Deepbit had a few really unlucky days after the change while both deepbit and some other pools had some REALLY lucky days during the end of last difficulty blowing up the diff a bit higher than it should have been. Overall the hasrate of the network is still going up, granted at a slower speed than before.

Yeah, all those costly $160 5830's on eBay have to go somewhere...

(I saw a 5830 on eBay for $550 -- no joke!  And lots of them as high as $200. Not exactly SELLING at that price, but still!)

After they begged Mom to buy them one, those dumb kids want to start making their $2.30 a day ASAP -- after all, they have a LONG way to go before they're actually making money...

It's hot in UK as well.The problem is that even though the UK actually has cooler summers than USA,it's the humidity that's really problematic there.I know cus I'm from UK.The uncomfortable heat (plus humidity) is really causing me problems now for my 2 mining computers. I've had to leave my laptop running overnight 24/7 for 1.5wks now while Pc rests overnight to beat the heat.It's bad news because you're not really profiting anymore and can just about cover electricity costs (but that's it).The part of UK I'm on can be as hot as 35oC or more in the tough summers there and the humidity is quite high there as well.

Just adding my experience to share it with you guys.

P.S.Please don't mention why laptop GPUs are crap or anything else about the 'proper' way to mine but this is about beating the heat,not highest performance (I think).I am also fully aware of the risks and benefits of certain setups and practices.Thank you.

Ahh so I guess all the Canucks in the great white north have one advantage in mining eh? ;D
It's been struggling to get to 17c today. We usually only get a handful of 30c in the months of July Aug. No need for AC in my house! ;-) And no it is not an igloo! LOL! 

How far north are you? I checked Toronto and they will hit 32 C over the weekend.

So what price was difficulty following when Bitcoin first launched?

 ::)

Because bitcoin @ launch and bitcoin today are exactly the same right? We had GPU miners, nicely set up exchanges, media blitzes about bitcoin making money and silkroad exchanging bitcoin for drugs, tens of thousands of miners and potentially more speculators back in 2009 right?

But regardless, as an answer, the price was essentially null at launch, and the difficulty remained around 1, the lowest possible value. So your trite little question finds its answer there. Bitcoin was worth nothing, and we had almost no one mining. No violations there.

As I understand it, I could be wrong since I'm fairly new, it was only Satoshi for the whole year 2009 because difficulty was 1.00 all the way to block 32256 when difficulty moved to 1.18 on date 2009-12-30. Maybe he got more CPUs for his new year gift and difficulty went to 1.18 followed to 1.30 then 1.34 and so on. There was no bitcoin price/value at that time. $0.00.

You can check all of this here  http://blockexplorer.com/q/nethash (http://blockexplorer.com/q/nethash) when you will figure out what is what, then you type the block # here http://blockexplorer.com/ (http://blockexplorer.com/) to get the exact date.

This is precisely why it's absurd to make assumptions that difficulty follows price since there's been points where there was no price at all yet difficulty still rose.  You can draw certain correlations between the two, but there's a reason why "with a lag" catchall is almost always appended to the "difficulty follows price" pitch.  "With a lag" pretty much covers all your bases once the numbers start to get away from the theory.

even with the returns down 40%, it is still very much profitable. Hmm... 300%+ annual ROI via bitcoin mining vs 3% from money sitting in a bank account... Hell, in the 'real' world people jump for joy if they get anything above 10%! Would you call it a good investment if it took you 10 years to pay off your rig? But of course, we are just getting started, as profitable it may look today, it may not be so tomorrow.

even with the returns down 40%, it is still very much profitable. Hmm... 300%+ annual ROI via bitcoin mining vs 3% from money sitting in a bank account... Hell, in the 'real' world people jump for joy if they get anything above 10%! Would you call it a good investment if it took you 10 years to pay off your rig? But of course, we are just getting started, as profitable it may look today, it may not be so tomorrow.
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The two situations aren't comparable though.  Money in a bank account just sits there and collects interest.  Money put into a Bitcoin mining rig requires constant fussing with; you need to upgrade software as newer versions come along, keep the rig up and running through power failures, mining pool failures, potential hardware failures, and pay continual electricity bills.

Mining rigs have to pay themselves off in a manner of months.  The exponentially increasing difficulty level means that any rig will output most of its lifetime Bitcoins (>90%) within the first few months.  After that it's just peanuts.  So talking about it on a scale of ten years is meaningless.  Besides, there isn't a mining rig that exists today that will be worth running anything close to ten years from now.  New hardware will come along that is more efficient in terms of electricity used and will make anything we're running today not even profitable to run for mining within a few years.