Bitcoin Forum

After reading about mining for a bit and pricing out some components on NewEgg I used a few of the calculators available on the web (such as http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/). But all the ones I found were locked in at a certain difficulty level. This is not very useful for future projections when the rate of difficulty is increasing at an exponential rate. So, being a bit of an Excel junkie I created this spread sheet to see if GPU mining still has a chance to be profitable.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmXn4BnLUgYsdEF0TUtWUWtUaUUzR1F2aUhEWW9lN2c#gid=0

The outlook is not good for GPU miners. If my calculations are even semi accurate, there is no money to be made with GPUs, unless you own the hardware already and get free electricity. It seems GPU mining won't even pay for the hardware if you buy it now.

Please take a look at this sheet and share your thoughts on how fast you think mining difficulty will continue to rise in the future.

Sadly - it looks about right  :-X

Yeah, the recent 28% difficulty  jump really makes the future of mining look bleak unless you have some serious hardware...

welcome to the future

I just packed my 18x6870 which i ordered 29 days ago and they are going back to where they came from :'(

you will miss the heat it made. :)

Why is it that all of these predictions assume a fixed price per BTC...?

How would your graph look if at 150,000,000 difficulty that BTC is trading at $400/coin?

It's not fixed. You can change the BTC price to whatever you want. It's just defaulted to the current price.

The problem with most of these spreadsheets is for the later periods. For example, your spreadsheet assumes that the difficulty will increase by 265,669,181,621 on 13-Oct-2014. That means an increase in the network hash rate of 1.9017341e+18 h/s, that's 1,901,734.1 Th/s

I doubt that would be physically possibly even if every foundry on the planet was cranking out ASICs and there was enough labour and resources to assemble mining systems without any delay.

Yes but your speculation on loss of profitability stems entirely from using that fixed price point.

Any thing based on speculation will get more and more innacurate the farther out you speculate. I think it's pretty close for the near term, but there are a lot of factors we can't predict right now.

As far as the difficulty rate increasing exponentially, I don't know how long it can continue. Maybe the growth rate will become more linear soon, even drop once the profitability goes down. If I had a crystal ball I'd be a millionaire. I guess that's why some people will AISCs are selling Meghash contracts, to curb the risk of the unknown for a set profit now.

That fixed point is the price of BTC when you sell them at some date in the future, ideally when it is highest. If you are worried about the price dropping you could sell your BTC as soon as you mine them, or periodically as you choose.

I don't want to get into that sort of speculation with this sheet, that's why I used a set amount. You can play still around with different BTC to USD conversion rates and see how the price will affect your net income.

There is literally no way to even speculate on future pricing of BTC, with any kind of claim to accuracy. It could be $400, or $4000 or $400,000,000, or it could be $1. You can be bearish, or bullish, and you really can't back it up with anything beyond that.

You can certainly speculate on hashing power, based on current available data, pricing, orders-to-date, etc., within a reasonable set of bounds.

To create a spreadsheet predicting difficulty is entertainment, to predict price, madness.

Sorry, I thought it was set so anyone could edit and plug in values to try, but apparently it was not. Now it's open so anyone can edit, feel free to adjust the values on the right...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmXn4BnLUgYsdEF0TUtWUWtUaUUzR1F2aUhEWW9lN2c#gid=0

Great info although very generous with the calculations. There are many unknown variables but with the ASICs being flooded before end of year my calculations looking at various factors and pre order numbers it will be over 200 million before the end of the year.

Which calcultations are you refering to? The sheet is open so people have been modifying all the input values. Or are you refering to some of the formulas that calculate the values on the left?

forecasting is not an exact science, far from it, but the way you did it is incorrect. A better way is to increase the difficulty based lets say on the average of the last 5 periods + 10% or  -10% depending on the direction. Your exponential increase eventually runs into requiring more and more grains of sand to the point that there's none available. The difficulty will run into a wall where GPU and ASIC farms will start closing. Many smart (cough cough) people is mining to be rich. Wrong move, they will at best break even and will be served divorce papers instead :-) Also count on BTC going down to previous levels. The current BTC price requires new money coming into the system at a pace of 100 million dollars ++++ year. That will not happen

So why doesn't BTC just implode right now without this 100 million coming in every year?

3-4 million a day with only 1-2 going out?


Nice.

I think this is very useful, thank you.  :)

Just did a google search for "site:bitcointalk.org https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet" & this was by far the most valuable spreadsheet that i have come by. Thank you!

Awsome. Good work, dude

Most useful but also pretty depressing. But thank you all the same

Thank you for taking the time to create this spreadsheet.  It is a little depressing to look at, but gives me an idea of how things might play out.

If you have time, is there any chance you can add a field that will allow users to show what it will look like if mining starts n days from now.  I have not received my equipment yet, and I am trying to see what things might look like when I receive my miner in the coming weeks.  Thanks.

First, thanks for sharing the great sheet and taking the time to make it up. A huge help and the best I've seen anywhere.

So, what do you guys think about the October 13' prediction, really way over 100 million? That means I most probably shouldn't buy a Bitfury 25Gh for 1240 Euro. Be much much better to just buy BTC's with the money, especially if they come down in price.

Question:  Is the Hash Rate in 1,000's?  If I have a 14Gh ASIC miner do I enter 14,000?  Thanks.

100 million in October is very likely.
I also put together a spreadsheet, very optimistic one. That 25Gh miner will mine maybe 20btc first year, then another 5btc. With 1240€ you can buy 17btc @70€. 20 if the price is @60€.
https://i.imgur.com/baEMXw9.png

Thanks a lot for that chart. I'm sure others appreciate it.

If it is that close I just can't imagine taking a chance. Though it would feel great to have coins I mine in a paper wallet till I'm old.   :D
Being able to have coins now and trade in and out at opportune times is just a better gamble.

Again, I don't understand why the cost is the same for October considering their discount with the 400Gh machine. Would be nice to discount it.
Would also be nice to not see August units for sale on Ebay that weren't even paid for yet.  >:(

Hey did you check the reward for LTC? Its still pretty profitable

Wait up OP, the BTC difficulty in your spreadsheet in November will be 20 BILLION???
I think that isn't possible...

According to CURRENT growth rates, it will be 5 billion by next year
http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/a/a96771e2ea

I dont think that is possible either.  Someone tell me what is the realistic upper limit on the difficulty (at current BTC price)??

From everything I've read, it seems like a December figure of 100-120 or so million is more realistic. We just had a huge jump, but that is because a lot of miners just produced (by KNC?) were turned on. That won't continue. Avalon is behind, BFL is behind. We'll see what Bitfury and KNC do, I have a feeling they will be closer to delivering, but we'll see. But much of that is slated for Oct/Nov.

What people need to understand is that the advances going forward are not akin to CPU advances. The ASICs will get smaller and more efficient, but from everything I've heard, they won't really get much faster. It is just a hashing algorithm of sorts and there is only so much you can do with that. But chips will be made en mass - It will happen and the delays will probably be a thing of the past once we get past the newness (and greed - companies holding or selling to highest bidder, maybe like Avalon did ). These first generation miners are not going to be in operation deep into next year imo. Still be a novelty device to have your erupter stick or Jalapeno. Sort of like an Atari 2600 now. Who knows, maybe that alone will raise the resale value ;-)

and, sadly, I don't want to join google to have a look at the spreadsheet. :'(
talk about an information thief (google)

maybe there is another way?

I actually have a pretty good forecast with historical data in mind.
 
4482961509- 03/14       
5150199218 04/14      
5817436928 05/14      
6484674638 06/14      
7151912348 07/14      
7819150057 08/14      
8486387767 09/14      
9153625477 10/14      
9820863187 11/14      
10488100896 12/14      
11155338606 01/15      
11822576316 02/15
The miner is capable of 600 GH/S   

Here is a profit decrease model
 
1577.34      
1165.8      
1030.83      
923.63      
836.44      
764.13      
703.19      
651.13      
606.15      
566.89      
532.33      
501.67   

Profit lost in respective to the last known profit       
-411.54      
-135.8      
-107      
-87      
-72.31      
-60.94      
-52.06      
-44.98      
-39.26      
-34.56      
-30.66   

To be honest, Bitcoin is pretty profitable if you know what you are doing. There are many cynics out there that believe BTC is over excluding MTGOX victims.
If the numbers are true from the data then we can definitely conclude that as bitcoin grows more difficult to mine the hardware manufacturers will enjoy bountiful amounts of income. Many metropolitan areas have office space for lease between 150 to 300 square feet and the monthly rent ranges from $150 to $330 dollars excluding New York Dallas and etc. If one were to rent space many landlords include electricity costs within the rent so in my case I did not factor in electricity costs. I have noticed that they sometimes would come into the building and turn the lights off to save electricity but I told them in no circumstances can they touch the locked racks. If one were to reach above the 600 gh/s rate it would be wise to rent out space if expansion is wanted.

Thanks

P.S. The equipment I considered free because the expense was paid by a friend who I did a favor for in 2006.

sez I need access

Just wanted to say thanks for the excel calculations. Works perfectly and demonstrates that I have most likely lost $15k buying 2 x Neptunes just delivered and break even with 4 x Cointerra's (converted to contract) delivered early June.

Still it's great to be a part of the game!

Glad to see so many have found this useful. I haven't even looked at it in months, I didn't' realize that it was so popular here.

Remember that this is an open sheet that any can fiddle with, so check all your Mining Factors in the grey box and make sure they fit your particular scenario. This means how many Mega Hashes your equipment is running, how many Watts you're using, the cost of electricity (if any) for you, how much you think the BTC will be worth when (and if) you sell them, ect...

Also if you want the most accurate difficulty forecast, enter the most recent ACTUAL difficulty and the date it started.

How can I change the inputs for the H/s my computer can process and the associated Watts it consumes? There's a cell that says "fill in these fields," but I don't see anywhere to change these inputs. I see a Sheet 1 and Sheet 3, perhaps the inputs used to be on a Sheet 2?

Also, is there any way to change the estimated number of hours at max (12 hrs instead of 24 hrs)?

Thank you!

forecast is a bit too aggressive in these times.