Bitcoin Forum

Asics is now taking over the network hashing power.
When will asics have so much power that all other forms of mining is not profitable? That point has to come rather soon..

Will it be noticeable, that every gpu mining rig is leaving the network? Or will it happen over a long time with the only result that the difficulty curve will not be as steep?

I realize that some miners will still keep their equipment running even if they are not making any money on it.

My expected timeline:

ASICs start entering in droves, hashrate and difficulty shoot up.
Remnant GPU miners switch to SCRYPT based coins (litecoin, worldcoin etc.)
BTC hashrate/difficulty drops a bit, and then goes back to it's current trend.

How soon it will happen all depends on how many/how soon the ASIC producers will actually ship any decent amount of the machines. Given that most of them were supposed to be out by now and very few have actually been seen (yet) in the wild, I would be careful about making any prediction about how they will affect the market.

There are plenty of people mining with GPUs who have "free" electricity. As long as they get something out of mining it will continue. Difficulty must be 100x or so until GPUs are completely out of question.

Shutting down the GPU farms will be gradual as different countries have different electricity rates, the difference in electricity rate can be 10x between to countries.

Major movement in BTC/USD price can make things completely different, GPU mining can end next week if there is a huge crash in BTC price, or it can continue through this year if BTC gains value rapidly.

Thanks for answer. Yes I realize that it is hard to predict.

My belief is that people will leave gpu mining in a rather even pace, so that the actual switch to almost 100% asics will not even be seen on the difficulty.

>> When will the gpu line be crossed?

When my ASIC(s) arrive and not before.
Sam

CPU mining fizzled out this same way. Eventually even the bot owners (who stole the compute time + electricity from their marks) quit even though it was still technically profitable because even the small effort put in yielded so little value in return.

GPUs are not returning great profit but still today decently profitable for the typical (paying $0.15 per kWh).   But back a few months ago the prognosis was that "in a few months" it's all over for GPUs.  Well, the ASICs took longer to start shipping in quantity but they are today shipping and this is what is happening without the backorders even coming close to having been cleared:

https://i.imgur.com/yksreQK.png  
 - http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png


Nope ... an exchange rate rise, even hitting BTC/USD of $500  won't keep the pace anywhere near the difficulty rise.   Start planning some other use for your GPUs.

Since profit margins vary wildly depending on how efficiently people have set up their rigs, how much their electricity costs, and how much they expect to make off selling their GPUs, it is fair to say that "the GPU line is being crossed now", it's just that the line is thick and some have crossed, some are crossing, and some have yet to cross it. It's also worth noting that it may be worth mining with GPUs for a relative loss for some period after the line has crossed if you assume that BTC will eventually climb further in value, provided you're willing to hang onto them. How long after is a question no one can answer, but there comes a point where you're earning nothing but dust in terms of absolute BTC and by then it's clear (which is the case for CPUs now).

I already stopped mining using my gpu, its more profitable to just buy shares from asic miners securities.

NEVER!!!

http://retrothing.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83452989a69e201156fb276bf970c-800wi

 I believe this to be the case as well, especially with this last difficulty jump given current BTC/USD valuation. I see myself retiring all of my GPU's by Christmas - Don't much see the point in switching the GPU's to LTC (although, I'm open to being convinced otherwise)

I feel that the line is already crossed, those who are still mining, I guess will mine until their GPUs are dead and replaced them with ASICs if their electricity bills permit.  Others will have already stopped using GPUs.

This is great observation