Bitcoin Forum

I went ahead and made a new Google Spreadsheet with the latest difficulty data in wolfram:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Auya3iRE6az1dDc0UVgwMU52YVpTazVjSHByOGNiWHc&usp=sharing

This time I didn't make any changes to the exponential factor spit out by wolfram.  It seems little too optmistic, so I don't think it will be accurate for more than 1 or 2 retaigets.

Here is the wolfram link:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=exponential+fit+%7B%7B13%2C+3651012%7D%2C%7B37%2C+4847647%7D%2C%7B96%2C+11187257%7D%2C+%7B120%2C+15605633%7D%2C%7B156%2C26162876%7D%2C%7B167%2C31256960%7D%2C%28189%2C50810340%7D%7D

Again... feel free to tweak the values.

Edit: Updated 7/13 with latest difficulty numbers: base = 2.83643 exponential=0.0142844
Edit: Updated 8/16 with latest difficulty numbers: base = 1.89041 exponential=0.0172202
Edit: Updated 8/31 with projected difficulty values: base = 1.05869 exponential=0.0207254 !!

===== Original =======
Just for fun while waiting for Avalon to get around to shipping B3 units, I created a google spreadsheet to project the estimated BTC generated for a given hashrate received at a particular time during the year.  Is it pretty easy to use... just put in your expected delivery date in the yellow box, and your hash rate in the green one.  Feel free to try it out!

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Auya3iRE6az1dG9fRkpXdFJtT1dNX0VCU1F0VFFUX3c&usp=sharing

To get the projected hashrate I used historical some data points starting in mid January through this last for difficulty adjustment (6/16/2013) and used and exponential fit in wolfram alpha.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=exponential+fit+%7B28.19%2C2968775%7D%2C%7B40.88%2C3275465%7D%2C%7B65%2C4847647%7D%2C%7B87.9%2C6695826%7D%2C%7B112.11%2C8974296%7D%2C%7B124.59%2C10076293%7D%2C%7B137.2%2C11187257%7D%2C%7B161%2C15605633%7D%2C%7B172%2C19339258%7D


One caveat:
Wolfram alpha's best exponential curve seemed a bit optimistic on growth rate. I upped it a bit to what I think would be more conservative (but who knows?!).
These projections put the difficulty at 100M+ at the end of september, and 1B+ at the beginning of March 2014.

I am not sure how to allow you guys to make your own edits without saving... so if you want to edit, you will have to make a copy I'm afraid.

Interesting predictions and thank you.

Why did you choose to have difficulty changing every day when, in fact, it only changes every 2016 blocks (currently about 10 days).

thats scary  ::)

Sure makes you think when it comes to ASIC profitability past Sept/Oct that's for damn sure..

I did daily for a couple of reasons:

1) I had wolfram alpha calculate the exponential regression on a day time scale rather than block (though I did do a block spreadsheet but found it less interesting)
2) I didn't want to try figure out the early completion of the 2016 blocks (I'm lazy  ;D)

Would y'all prefer if I made the document editable?
The risk is a griefer would mess around with the formulas (and break the spreadsheet -- or inserts something weird in it).

I guess it isn't that big a deal for everyone to make a copy if they want to change the values.

It is a shame they don't offer per-cell locking as I could just open up date and hashrate cells.

Thank you for this, very interesting.

I think a document like this is best left locked. Even without griefers, multiple people trying to edit the same couple of cells can be pretty annoying when you are trying to use it.

It is impossible to get an accurate prediction with just extrapolation. There are 4 more pieces of information you could add to make the predictions much more accurate:

1. How much hashing power is expected to ship over the next year or so (and when).
2. The difficulty rate of change at which an ASIC costs more than the amount it will ever mine.
3. The difficulty at which electricity costs make it unprofitable to mine with an ASIC.
4. The difficulty at which electricity costs make it unprofitable to mine with an GPU.

+1 Thanks +)

Correct... This is pure speculation with a little math thrown in to keep it somewhat sane.  The exponential phase we are in can't go on forever.  However I thought this had a good balance of optimism and pessimism.  It also tracks to the last 5 months which include the asic deployments by avalon and asicminer fairly closely. 

My theory is that the exponential growth phase requires asics to be deployed to continue the trend.  The amount of growth required won't be plausible with FPGA and GPU mining. At some point that growth won't be sustainable. This model doesn't try to predict that point.

Interesting spreadsheet.

A couple of interesting points are that difficulty, network hash rate, AND price actually went down in March-April of 2012, and also in October of 2011.

While it is difficult to do statistics on something like that, one could assume because of the size of the network that a lot of people made some calculation that it was not profitable for them to mine, so they stopped, then at some point started back up again.

This is supported by the subsequent spike in difficulty in the months immediately following those months.

The same thing happened in December of 2012, there was an actual decrease in difficulty, followed by consistent increases in difficulty.

Thus, we can conclude that we will probably see huge jumps in difficulty (over 20%) per every 10 days over the next months.

Pretty interesting stuff.

I am using your spreadsheet to evaluate various WTS offers. Pretty interesting...

400M by the end of the year you say?
2.8PH/s would be an interesting mark.

We are the 6/26/2013 and you predicted 24,817,097 but it is only 19,339,258
So a difference of 28.32%

Thx for making us scare.

next change is 21mil so far.
it's just that bitcoin difficulty adjusts within 7-14 days.

he's not off by much. considering ASICminer randomly turned off their machines for a few days this cycle and avalon fucked up there batch2-3 shipments.

It's not a big difference for now but it increase with time.
Even taking 21mil that's 18.2% diff

http://www.asicminercharts.com/

lost 17TH for 7 days.
i'm too tired to do the math. but that's over 10% of the total bitcoin network lost.
throw in those numbers and the margin of error will be much slimmer.

123.76 blocks missed.

In all fairness, I did state a caveat that I made the chart a bit more pessimistic than Wolfram was plotting.

Wolfram came up with a least squares best fit of 2026090*e^(0.0129097x)
Where x is the day in the year.  The spreadsheet uses 0.014825.

My exponent is 15% larger than what was calculated because I do firmly believe we are in the calm before the storm.

I tweaked the exponential factor because I knew the pace of Asic deployment was going to be pretty aggressive in the second half of the year.  I guess I see these charts as a sort of as a balance between the "worst case" and "it won't be too bad" scenarios.  That is why I shared it.  I figured if it were somewhat in the middle, it might be realistic.

I have actually moved onto an even more pessimistic projection for my planning purposes (0.01525) as I believe that to be even more accurate later (even if it is less accurate now).

Well, we are currently 4,000,000 behind the estimate for today.  :D That's moderately encouraging, I suppose.

well, asicminer predicts they'll push out another 800-1000TH by the end of this year.

They will push whatever they have to (or can) to stay in that slice of 25% to 33% of network hashrate. Remember, they said they'll never 'own' more then 1/3 of the network.

And forgot to ask - where did you come across these numbers?

One report for the asicminer to deploy 1PH/s by years end:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=246375.msg2612413#msg2612413

In other news:
I have updated the spreadsheet with a global hash rate since I think people can model for themselves a bit better based on what vendors are announcing as shipping/shipped.
I made the exponential value a global so you can tweak to follow the current difficulty grows to do "what-if" growth scenarios.

I have reset the exponent to a more optimistic 0.013825, which has been tracking actually difficulty more closely... however I believe the curve will steepen as Avalon, BFL, 100TH/Bitfury, Metabank, Avalon Chip DIY/clones, etc. start ramping up.

Feel free to make a copy and tweak as you like.

Interesting speculation indeed. Let's see how soon or how late hashrate is delivered by the major players in the next six months.

Difficulty is 21.3 million now . Excellent Spreadsheat @ jspielberg.

I think actuals will outstrip projected in the next few retargets, but with the more optimistic growth curve exponential, it is tracking now fairly closely.

Yes and if you do the math you will quickly realize that three things will happen if these numbers are true.

Using 300GH as an example for how much hashing power these statements are based on:

1. In March of 2014 (maybe April) the Diff level will be so high that 300Gh will yield between 3 and 4 BTC a month
2. By Nov 2014 you will need 1TH of equipment to make 1 BTC a month
3. Bitcoins are done by the end of 2014 for the average person


Just my opinion I may be wrong and the price of BTC may go up 30 fold then everything I just said is CRAP   ;D

Updated spreadsheet in OP with pristine values from wolfram. The results I think are a little to optimistic, but they are what they are.  You can still tweak your delivery date, hash rate and exponential rate.

You are forgetting it's not about the money and ability to add ever increasing amounts of hashrates. What matters is BTC extraction rate and difficultly vs energy use and cost.

So basically it's about who is mining with the most power efficient ASIC's. The big players will be forced to stop long before "the average" person when their BTC extracted per g/hash is less in value than the cost of the electricity to extract it.

Remember few people get "free" power, and no commercial businesses do.

M

Looks like the next difficulty retarget on August 3rd is surprisingly close.
Spreadsheet: 36,578,251
Allchains.info: 36,689,312
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Auya3iRE6az1dDc0UVgwMU52YVpTazVjSHByOGNiWHc#gid=8

The next retarget is likely to forecast way low with Avalon B3 completing, and 100TH mine coming online.

Don't forget though that businesses generally pay less for their electricity than individuals. I would expect that private miners who pay for power will be forced out by electricity costs long before the same will happen to businesses.

It's now August 4th, and difficulty is 36.7 million.

Looks like you're pretty much spot on.

Good job. Hard to argue with good math.

I think the predictions based on previous growth rate is going to break down as we enter a steeper curve in the near future.  New technology projects like bitfury 100TH and avalon B3 come online in pulses.  This model takes no expected future events into account.  It is purely the exponential model of the difficulty growth since entering the "Asic Era" which I set as starting in early Feb.

My guess is that this model will be low for the next 2 months, slowly catch up to the actuals, and then be overly pessimistic in the early part of 2014.

So I'll ROI my KNC shares in about 1 month... nice.

Update

8/27/2013 spreadsheet prediction 62,333,209

Current difficulty 65,750,060

Still close but predictions are starting to get behind reality a bit.   

I just updated the spreadsheet with the latest projection.
The wolfram alpha data for the exponential portion of the graph can be found at:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=exponential+fit+%7B%7B13%2C+3651012%7D%2C%7B37%2C+4847647%7D%2C%7B96%2C+11187257%7D%2C+%7B120%2C+15605633%7D%2C%7B156%2C26162876%7D%2C%7B167%2C31256960%7D%2C%7B189%2C50810340%7D%2C%7B200%2C+65750060%7D%2C%7B210%2C85000000%7D%7D

I also added a daily linear difficulty  since the exponential won't grow forever (the red box).
Once the daily difficulty growth hits the threshhold difficulty will grow linearly at that rate rather than exponentially.

The link is still:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Auya3iRE6az1dDc0UVgwMU52YVpTazVjSHByOGNiWHc&usp=sharing

I have put in a daily linear rate of 40,000,000 which seems high, but we currently haven't seen wide scale asic deliveries yet and we are already at 1,500,000 daily difficulty growth.
Feel free to copy and edit as you like.

1 billion by christmas ... wee!

Thank you for this jspielberg !

So am I correct, that if I order one KNC Jupiter right now and it´s really shipped in November, I´m not getting my ROI, right?
That means I could buy 10 or 100 of them (if I had a millon dollar) and still lose?

So what´s the deal here?

KNC has already told some Jupiter orders that they will ship with 500 Ghash/s and not 400. Not sure if that changes your ROI but still a nice gesture (especially compared to BFL - "But For Loss")

I'm curious though, any other sites for good mining profitiability calculators? They are all over the place.

You lose, KNC wins. That's the deal. Buy more, lose more.