Bitcoin Forum

Moderated version. The original thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=278384.0) (now locked) is useful to see how the numbers evolved.

The idea
The purpose is to try to guesstimate (and yes that means error) the amount of hashpower in "the pipeline".  If there were no pre-orders, difficulty would rise based on sales and that makes future sales less attractive (lower ROI%) which reduces the amount of future sales.  This economic feedback model constrains hashing power based on efficiency, electrical cost, capital cost, exchange rate, the risk premium miners are willing to accept and the time value of money.    GPU didn't continue to grow to petahash scale because as new hardware was deployed it lowered the reward and increased the risk on future hardware and this slowed the growth until a rising exchange rate improved the reward.

Preorders break this feedback cycle as difficulty doesn't rise until delivery.  This can result in sold (but undelivered) capacity growing faster and larger than would happen if it was constrained by immediate feedback.  This is a great scenario for hardware vendors; they can sell more hardware, earlier and at higher prices.  On the other hand it means miners may face an avalanche of hardware purchased by their peers who don't quite understand how high difficulty can go. Accurately projecting growth for any period of time longer than a month is probably an exercise in futility.   We can however look at it from a different direction; if we can guesstimate the amount of preorders and can also estimate delivery timeframe then we can use that for the basis of a curve. So throw me your cites, guesstimates, and official numbers to try an pin down how much capacity has already been purchased.  

The rules
1) To keep this thread from derailing please leave the "xyz is a scam" or "abc sucks because ..." posts for another topic.
2 ) No idea/number is bad.  Please be respectful.  Honestly nobody knows for sure, except the chip makers and they aren't talking.
3 ) To stay on topic I will erase anything even remotely in violation of rule #1 and #2
4 ) A good starting point is the total amount preordered.  It may not be realistic but it provides a starting point.
5 ) Right now we aren't so much worried how likely a plan is just that there is a plan.  We can discount the hashpower by probability later (on edit: starting separating unfunded plans from presales and investor funded operations)
6 ) If you have a reference or cite (even unofficial) to back up a guestimate please link to it.  
7 ) If there is no reference a reasonable explanation is more useful then just posting a number. "Show your work".
8 ) We can safely assume that all non-ASIC hashrate will go to zero so no need to break it out between delivered and ordered.  Eventually hashrate ~= total pre-orders.
9 ) Mining companies buying retail product won't be listed seperately as they should already be included in the chip makers total.  Large operations should be noted so we can improve the estimate for the chip maker.

The running total

Promised delivery by December 2013

Announced product but insufficient information to make an informed analysis (should be considered lower confidence and conservative estimators may wish to exclude completely)


Post 2013 rollouts






Relationship between difficulty and hashing power

Upper limits on difficulty based on hardware efficiency:
Miners are unlikely to mine when their electrical costs are higher than the value of BTC mined.  This limit can be called the electrical break even point and is based on:
a) the current exchange rate (USD per BTC)
b) the hardware efficiency (J/GH )
c) the miner's electrical rate (USD per kWh)

When hashrate/difficulty gets high enough it will cause the least efficiency miners to idle thus creating a sort of replacement cycle (i.e. x GH/s new efficiency hardware causes Y GH/s of older less efficient hardware to idle).  This should slow growth significantly because the returns on new hardware will be low, miners will be exposed to the bad news of less efficient miners being forced to idle and X GH/s doesn't mean the hashrate only rises by (X-Y)/GH.  It also illustrates the improbability of difficulty power growing exponentially over a long period of time like a year.  For example 65 million difficulty gaining 75% per month for a year results in 50 billion difficulty.  The electrical cost even at 1W/GH and $0.10 per kWh would >$250 per BTC.  

A related thread on the break even point is here:  Break even difficulty by hardware efficiency (power cost = value of BTC) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281279.0)






[1] https://docs.google.com/a/nacrypto.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AiLYkKIHJaIsdHpIaGdUOWRYVUdncTNpNlVKbVhCbEE#gid=0  970,000 chips @ 282 MH nominal
[2] 550 orders @ 400 MH nominal
[3] Based on report that Dave (US distributor) sold out of their allocation of 300 full systems and 300 starter systems.  Oct is not sold out but conservatively it will if/when Aug deliveries are made.  I will assume that the EU distributor received an equal allocation (an assumption based on bitfury facing unknown demand and users in both markets).
[4] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8577/how-much-asic-power-has-been-or-is-being-shipped-in-2013  Crude assumption based on distribution of wait list (hashing power per order) and number of orders.  2PH/s is guestimated based on (avg GH/s per order of known orders)*(num order numbers)*(1/3 to account for unpaid/test orders).  Monarch is highly unlikely to ship in volume (if at all) in 2013 while upgrades cancel the existing 65nm order which would reduce the amount of 65nm pre-orders.
[5] Guestimate. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=278384.msg2994436#msg2994436
[6] https://bitfunder.com/asset/IceDrill.ASIC
[7] http://www.dpcapital.net/blockchain/?hours=336
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occam's_razor
[9] Reduced to 30 full systems in Aug for both US and EU distributors https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=278384.msg3010364#msg3010364
[10] http://www.coindesk.com/cointerra-cuts-price-of-terraminer-iv-bitcoin-mining-rig/ "In Dec" without a specific date can mean as late as 31 DEC.  Given that and the tight schedule and the fact that even a small delay would push it into 2014 I included it in the 2014 group.  Cointerra promises 20% additional hashrate if more than 30 days late so bump the amount from 2 PH/s to 2.5 PH/s.
[11] https://ghash.io/
[12] HashFast MPP will issue miners up to 4x their initial hashing power if 100% ROI is not acheived within 90 days.  Even if MPP is not needed, HashFast would need the chips in reserve and any chips not paid out in the MPP are likely to be deployed as quickly as possible.
[13] http://www.coindesk.com/bitmine-to-drop-4phs-of-asic-power-onto-bitcoin-network-before-april/
[14] http://thegenesisblock.com/cointerra-expects-to-deliver-2-phs-of-asics-in-december/ (Numerous references, Cointerra 2PH/s, KNC 0.5 to 2 PH/s, AsicMiner 1 PH/s, Bitfury 0.5 PH/s, Avalon 0.32 PH/s
[15] Upgraded BFL estimate from 2 PH/s to 3 PH/s https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=278384.msg3029092 (see also the next two posts)
[16] https://picostocks.com/docs/index/19
[17] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264696.msg3033042#msg3033042
[18] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820.msg3046590#msg3046590
[19] http://thegenesisblock.com/easic-announces-24-ths-hash-fast-miner-activemining-shares-move-70/
[20] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820.msg3125451#msg3125451

Reserved for highlights from original thread.

Reserved.

I think this needs to be looked at as much from the expenditure side as the forecast fabrication side.

In essence, a years worth of investment is coming onto the network now and over the next few months.  A lot of new miners (like me) have spent their available cash on pre-orders.  I'm not sure that the market will be there to pay for the production of the ~ 6 PH/s that's been announced by the new ASIC foundries over the past couple of weeks.

Of course, I could be very wrong, and new corporate-scale mining companies with new external capital might appear, but the existing contract 'cloud' hashing services don't seem to me to be capturing that much interest.

So another way to look at the question would be to try and calculate retrospective month-by-month dollar spends, and projecting that curve and factoring in some approximate hashrate-per-dollar forecasts. 

It's an interesting way to think about it, but how would you get the spend numbers? It's not like these chip companies are publicizing revenue.

That is why we are looking at pre-orders.  A large portion of the initial 6 PH/s in 2013 has ALREADY been paid.  Now maybe miners overpaid and will never see a return but that hashing power will come online regardless because it is a sunk cost.   Take Avalon chips as an example.  There is a very good chance those that bought them will never see a positive return because they aren't online yet however once manufactured they are a sunk cost.  Not mining just means a -100% ROI.  Mining means something better.  They may still lose but a -20% ROI is better than -100% so they will be used ... by somebody.

Now I agree with some of the numbers it is tough to estimate how many sales have occured.  Cointerra indicated they are selling 2 PH/s.  How much of that 2 PH/s have they sold.  The good news is most of the "may not be able to sell" are further out.  I would consider the 2013 numbers to be of a higher confidence.  I would also point out that the amount of capital depends on the selling price.  The cost per GH (excluding NRE) of 28nm silicon is probably less than $0.25.  An entire system is probably about $1 (people forget how much power supplies including DC to DC PSU cost).

So if we assume 6 PH/s has already been paid the question becomes how much more capacity could be sold at prices declining to $2 per GH/s.  

Simple version:
Price reflects supply and demand not cost.  If people are buying $20 per GH/s and you are selling out why would you lower the price.  You lower the price when it is higher than your marginal cost of production AND you are no longer able to sustain sales at the current price.  I think we can get to 100 PH/s eventually just by cutting prices however that is harder to project.

One question you may also want to consider, with the manufacturers that have a promise to increase the hashing power in certains circumstances, how much will that then ultimately add to the 6PH estimate you have? 

Don't forget Bitfury's private pool(at least I believe it is his pool) -> https://ghash.io/. I haven't been keeping up with it but I know it has grown to 100 TH/s very quickly. This has nothing to do with the 100TH(now 200TH) mine. Wouldn't be surprised to see Bitfury just maintain 20% of the network for months to come given how efficient his chips are.

edit: Just realized this post may not be useful for the purpose of your thread. Just something that should be considered though given the opportunity that Bitfury has to replace ASICMINER as the 800 pound gorilla on the network. If ASICMINER's 2nd generation chips can compete with Bitfury you could end up with a large chunk of the network held by those two.

I had already included HF and I added 0.5 PH/s to Cointerra to reflect 20% "bonus" for late delivery.  I am not aware of any other company offering additional hashrate capacity.

Assuming:
1) 0.25 kW per TH/s
2) 0.12 USD per kWh
3) 6 blocks per hour
4) no income from fees

then 100000 TH/s requires 500 USD per BTC just to cover the power costs - which is actually more viable than I thought it was going to be. 

(across the network, over 26 million USD per year in power costs alone)

And where is 200TH mine? Bitfury chips. ghash.io is private bitfury pool, different story than 200TH mine.

link?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140366.0
https://picostocks.com/stocks/view/19
https://picostocks.com/docs/index/19

It looks like BTCGarden is ~ 1750TH in 2013 https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264696.msg3033042#msg3033042 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=264696.msg3033042#msg3033042)

Updated BTCGarden & 100/200TH project (based on Bitfury).

I think it may be important to start considering the inability for all companies to meet sales quotas.  Take BTCGarden for example their main run 1.5 PH/s is 130nm arriving in Nov with a selling price of $14 per GH/s.  I just don't see that being popular giving the rising hashrate, and the fact that power will be more important in 2014.  I think ~6 PH/s by end of 2013 is probable and would be willing to wager at least that much has already been pre-ordered.  Sales beyond that I think are more questionable.  I see Cointerra ($8 per GH & 0.7 J/W) being more likely to fill their orderbook than BTCGarden ($11 per GH & >7 J/GH). If I get a chance I may break out "pre-sold" (as in already paid) from "planned capacity" (which may not be able to attract sales).   

Another thing to consider is the combined total is ~15 PH/s.  This is getting close to the electrical break even point (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281279.0) for the less efficient miners.  These two topics go hand in hand.  The hardware rollout gives us an idea of how quickly we will approach the break even point for various devices.  Beyond the BE point we will begin to see the least efficient hardware "retire" and that is going to slow hashpower growth.  Anyone interested should probably read both topics even if you disagree with my assumptions you can come up with your own.

Long-term miners are going to shift to much cheaper electricity. .12 USD is not sustainable.

So for all the competition and talk, the future if bitcoin is STILL controlled by BFL.

Wow

3 fucking petahash


Not viable for 99.99% of people.

Only groups like ASICminer or others with millions of $ invested can make this move.

This is a single person with this hasing power?

You know what would be very, very interesting to see?

$ sent to these companies over time.

IIRC, BFL got something like 50,000,000$ in pre-orders.

Avalon's chips total about 8,000,000$

KNC?  Terrahash? Less than 8,000,000$

The hashing power is a sigmoid curve (low, exponential growth for a period, then levels off because the hashing power and absurd costs means that we go from the old days of making 100% ROI in ~3 days - 3 months, to a sane, stable 100% ROI in 1-2 years even with no hashrate change

The money spent to each company is an inverted sigmoid curve

People talk about moore's law but don't understand it.  That's part of a trillion dollar computing industry.  Bitcoin doesn't work that way.  And frankly, any increases past cointerra will be marginal at best.

Single person is probably not accurate.  It is a single entity I imagine it takes more than one person to build, manage, and maintain it.

Ok, I had heard some talk that it was a combined pool of various, numerous people who had bought those chips

I think you may be underestimating KnC as they pan to mine on their own devices and we have no idea how much that will add.

Um, are you forgetting someone?

They should have 3-4TH in a few weeks, and will be ordering a 50TH run of chips soon, which should be delivered late September, and online in Oct.

[ActiveMining] 24 TH/s.
http://thegenesisblock.com/easic-announces-24-ths-hash-fast-miner-activemining-shares-move-70/

True however we need to start somewhere.  Who knows what the future hashrate will be BUT if we know 6 PH/s has been pre-ordered then we know it will at least rise by that much.  IF we believe it is realistic that will be deployed by end of Dec then that lets of start to see growth of the network.

Both added.  Thanks.

Thanks for the work on making this analysis.

It's sort of scary but good to know.

Yes.  Thanks & fixed.

Its not a single person pool, I have access and I am not bitfury.

Anyway, interesting read D&T.

Some more specs of the new chip by Bitmine.ch

https://bitmine.ch/?p=882


https://bitmine.ch/?page_id=863

so what is worst case ?

1000 mio diff at the beginning of 2014 ?

level at about 1400 mio in march ?

if you run 500 GH/s from jan - dez 2014 with this diff you would would mine 65 btc

hm... ::)  

I had originally thought 1 billion difficulty by ~15 Nov, but with Avalon's problem causing a domino effect of the start-ups, I'm beginning to think we might not hit it by the end of the year.  The next 45 days will tell the story, once KNC starts shipping I think we'll have a clearer picture.  They seem to have the largest preorder batch atm.

Thanks for compiling this!

what those numbers in brackets mean next to hash numbers? in op

thank you

Those are citations for the end of the OP.

This is a huge job, d&T - thanks for taking it on.

D&T has done a good guestimate on the hash rate numbers by the end of the year.

My other thread I totally underestimated the hashrate at the end of the year in my poll.

5 PH/s to 9 PH/s by year end sounds definitely feasible. I'd guess on the higher end (closer to 9).

Good job D&T

Labcoin's upped their 2013 max to 200-300TH/s based on their 65nm chip.   the 50th should be by the end of october.

Order numbers upon placing one for a rig are presently around 1300. Not sure if they bundle all products together in order numbers.

It's the same order system they used for their Batch #1 and Batch #2 Avalon clones and the orders seem to be consecutive. They probably include BTC orders that timed out by late or no payment.

Avalon expect to sale second generation chips (55nm) late October 2013 for immediate shipping.
http://thegenesisblock.com/avalon-refunds-22000-btc-2-9m-to-asic-miner-customers/ (http://thegenesisblock.com/avalon-refunds-22000-btc-2-9m-to-asic-miner-customers/)

So any ideas on size of their batch?

We don't have a lot of facts to go on for Avalon v2 but:
a) We know it is 55nm compared to 110nm.  Die efficiency should be 4x that of v1 Avalon.
b) It is "backwards compatible" which I interpret to be same package/pinout.  
c) Avalon says late Oct which is code word for Dec and given their delays in shipping, "customs issues" I probably will put them as complete miners hashing in January 2014 or later.
d) Avalon says they won't be doing presales.  That means they accept the full risk of the NRE + batch run costs (as fab will want that up front).  I think this will act as a limit on # of wafers ordered.

Guestimate:
Avalon current design is a single hashing engine (1 hash per clock) running at up to 330 Mhz for 330 MH/s.  The current chip is on a 110nm process and has a die size of 16.12 mm^2 which means a die efficiency of 20.5 MH/s per mm^2.  A perfect die shrink would make that ~80 MH/s per mm^2.  For comparison BFL is ~70 MH/s per mm^2 and Bitfury is 138 MH/s per mm^2 in efficiency.  To give Avalon some margin lets say they improve die efficiency to 100 MH/s per mm^2 (improved clock speed, tweaked hashing engine).   Now Avalon likely isn't going to keep a single hashing engine design as the die would be insanely small (~4mm^2 as 55nm).  So it seems plausible they will take the v1 design shrink it and use the additional space to put more hashing engines running in parallel, similar to how Intel can make a 6 core chip today which has the same die size as a 130nm chip from the past.  Exactly how many parallel hashing engines Avalon uses doesn't really matter because it doesn't change the die efficiency (MH/s per mm^2).  A 6 HE chip is going to have 6x the throughput but take up 6x the die space.  There is some overhead for controller logic and I/O but it is minimal.  Bitcoin mining is an "embaressingly parallel problem".  My hypothesis is that since time is short, Avalon isn't looking for a redesign from scratch but rather they will take the v1 hashing engine (possibly with some minor tweaks/improvements and higher clock speed), shrink it to 55nm and then use as many in parallel which will keep the die size small enough to fit their existing package.  My guess is that would be 4 to 6 making the nominal output per chip 2GH/s to 3 GH/s.

A 300mm wafer has an area of 70,685 mm^2, lets assume 80 MH/s per mm^2 with a 10% drop due to wasted space (squares inside a circle).  That comes out to ~6.5 TH/s per wafer.  There are more accurate methods of calculating number of full dies but it requires knowing the exact dimensions of the chip but 90% effective is a good enough guesstimate.  If they get 95% yield that would be ~6TH/s usable chips per wafer.  Standard batch is 50 wafers so we are looking at 300 TH/s per batch.   Now they can order as large of a run as they want but given they have to front this cost/risk and with uncertainty on demand/pricing I could see them going with 2 batches (100 wafers) or 600 TH/s.  Avalon should have the resources to do that ($1M @ $10K nominal per wafer plus NRE).  While they could prepay for more that would be taking a big risk (no pre-orders to dump the risk on the customer).  They can always purchase more wafers at a later start is their is enough demand for follow on months.

So 600 TH/s in January for Avalon 55nm?  What does anyone else think?

That sounds like a very good estimate of the Avalon v.2 chips. Considering their short time frame and backwards compatibility, I would say your educated guesstimate is very close to on the money.

• The comments about using the same boards as the v.1 chips causes me to agree that the chips will be the same die size.
  
• The short time frame and backwards compatibility also support scaling out the single hash engine to accommodate the smaller device size.
  
• Your estimates on cash flow of avalon support the batch sizes you've suggested as well. The lack of preorders does place a much higher risk on BitSynCom, and I doubt they will sink their entire profit of v.1 into v.2. It honestly seems like the demand for asics has cooled off some.
  

Seems like another great estimate as always.

KNC Sept/Oct 500TH/s is way too low, because September are day1+2 [1,7] only(?) and ~800 orders [2].
Most of the orders contain at least one Jupiter, few orders contain one Saturn [6] which has not upgraded meanwhile [speculation].
October orders are shipped on 11 business days, so lets assume another 11*(800/2)= 4400 orders (containing Mercuries as well).
According to knc-staff Jupiter will have at least 500GH/s [3].

So let's calculate with 0,5TH/s as an average per order [6]: (800 + 4400) * 0,5TH/s = 2.600TH/s
Maybe even more since there are orders with 6,8,10+ Jupiters [6].
Cloudhashing wanted to buy from knc as well [4], don't know whether they actually pre-ordered. If so I guess it's one huge order. Looks like they did [7].


Those days knc is shipping ppl will think the network-graph must be broken as it is showing hashrate increase at an angle of 88° or so until October 15th when last ones are shipped [5]. At least it will not be comparable to anything we saw before during this time x_X



[1] https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-32
  "Finally we wish to confirm that yes we are still on track for our delivery towards the end of September."

[2] https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-20
  "The number was 890 but has dropped a little as not all bank transfers arrived in time."

[3] http://forum.kncminer.com/forum/main-category/hardware/107-psu-recommendation-jupiter-the-largest-planet?p=1050#post1050
  "According to our engineers an 850W, 80+ Gold certified PSU should be enough for a Jupiter running at the expected speed of 500 GH/s."

[4] https://cloudhashing.com/blog/13-blog/press/65-bitcoin-mining-as-a-service-maas
  "He (Cloudhashing’s founder, Emmanuel Abiodun) is also in negotiation with KNC, which he says is pledging September delivery for its own ASIC products."

[5] https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-33
  " All current paid orders will be shipped no later than October 15th.
    All new sales will reflect our November price point of;"

[6] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=249065.0
   "In Total 138 Jupiter 65 Saturn 17 Mercury"

[7] https://www.cloudhashing.com/frequently-asked-questions
  "A1: (...) We are currently mining and by September 2013, will be operating at over 115 terahashes. This number will climb steeply to 300 terahashes by November 2013. "
  "A2: We expect mining for September contracts to start by 26th September 2013 (...)"


*edits:
-added [speculation]
-removed [unverified] - thanks for contribution!
-added new links
-made it more readable

Cloudhashing has 110 TH from KnC promised to be online by 9/26, and at least another 50 TH coming online from KnC for October.

Very good.  Here is another link (distribution of 141 orders)  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=249065.0. if you want to add it to your cites.  It works out to 495 GH/s per order which I will round up to 500 GH/s.  I don't think 11 business days in Oct means they need to ship 400 units * 11 days = 4,400 unit backlog.  I think KNC is smart enough to give them some slack and then never "ran out" of Oct orders they simply closed it and pushed the delivery of new units back to Nov when the price dropped.  I think this was for two reasons a) to not have their customers ask for refund and reorder (if you are late order paying full price why not cancel and maybe get a unit a day or two later at reduced price) and b) to avoid "burning" their customer loyalty.  So I think assuming full queue 11 days * 400 is probably an overshoot still I do like the math and analysis.  I will discount it slightly to 4,000 orders today (sept/oct) with average of 0.5 TH/s which gives us 2,000 TH/s.  I have a high confidence it will be at least that much.  It may be more but I will update it to that for now.

I think this is a solid estimate. Many orders were also Mercury and Saturn, keep in mind, but many orders were also multiple Jupiters, I think it's fair to assume that these balance out.

I don't think we should just assume a straight die shrink efficiency gain.  Labcoin is 110nm and is claiming around ~2gh/s. on a 6.5x6.5mm 130nm die.  That's 47.6 Mh/mm² with 1.39 times the features per area. So scaled to 110 it would be 66Mh/s/²  Doing a 2x die shrink would mean 4x the performance, or all the way up to 266mh/s/².

And, on top of that, the smaller the transistor the less time it takes to, well transition. That means both power savings (because you lose less energy waiting for the cmos gates to close and, of course improved performance. So you could theoretically  boost performance even more.

So, if Avalon used it's money to hire some new, higher-skilled chip designers, they could potentially get a lot more performance out of their next-gen chips.

Well I gave them a 25% bump over straight die shrink.  As for Labcoin well I don't believe their claims but am willing to be surprised if/when they show hardware operating at that efficiency.  Still even if Labcoin can achieve that level of die efficiency it doesn't mean competitors will.  For example if you take Labcoin's claim 130nm to 55nm is actually (130/55)^2 = 5.5x reduction in die space.  Throw in 20% more for higher clock (faster switching time due to smaller process) and you are looking at closer to  314 MH/s per mm^2.  When you see that Bitfury is "only" 132 is starts to show how optimistic Labcoin's claims are.

Granted I don't know they can't do it but great claims requires great proof.   Labcoin's die efficiency claims are 30% to 70% better than any other announced specs when normalized for transistor size.

We kinda do know actually and is a good consideration:

https://www.kncminer.com/pages/faq

"We will not mine with more than 5%"

I don't read that news item as "890 orders will be day 1+2 deliveries". I read that as "The priority of the first 890 orders is based on order date and not pay date, like the rest of the orders will", so it might not be that bad.

Although looking at reference 6 (KnCMiner list of orders (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=249065.0)) though, I see day 2 deliveries all the way up to order 25xx, which could make the estimate of total KNC hashing power way more scary.

The 25xx includes unpaid orders.   There were ~800 orders shipped out on day 1 and day 2 based on the cutoff (purchase) date for day 2 shipping.

2 PH/s?

Update from Bitmine:
Shipping of the miners is starting from the 10th of December 2013
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/9/prweb11114003.htm (http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/9/prweb11114003.htm)

regarding cointerra, you could link this source, too.


**if you consider pre-ordering from them, this might be a good starting point for research:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=269093.msg3138029#msg3138029
 

these seem to be missing:

http://virtualminingcorp.com/
No idea of volume, but they sell seriously large machines (up to 25TH) and  they claim "Shipping Starts October/November 2013"
If they can get even close to that, its probably reasonable to assume they will have ordered a significant number of wafers (they would be crazy not to) and they may even challenge Cointerra for volume.

Note fast-hash=!hashfast

Also missing afaict:
https://www.xcrowd.co.uk/
again, no idea of volume, Im guessing no where near the other big players, as it seems too little too late, but shipping supposedly starts this year
"Bulk shipping start date - 20-12-2013 200 or 20% of total orders to be shipped per week"

One last remark; the exact timing of the global hashrate increase is of little importance for those not mining yet or not mining very soon. If all those 28nm asics end up being a few months later than projected, it means customers (on average) will receive them that much later, but also that the associated difficulty increase will be delayed. In the end its a wash on average. Obviously what does matter greatly is difference in shipping dates and execution between companies, but its pretty much impossible to guess who will meet their goals and who wont (and by how much they miss it). May as well assume promised delivery date, or apply the same delay to everyone.

D&T mentioned Active Mining (AMC/VMC I don't care enough at the moment to remember which does what now a days) in the OP but used the hashing power of a single maximally upgraded unit. If I had to guess, and this is a complete out-of-my-ass guess, since Active Mining will be getting its first round of 28nm chips in November (with high volume coming Januaryish), I would say that by the end of Q1 2014 it will have brought at least a couple (2-3) of ph/s to the network (assuming all goes as planned and on time - ha ha).

Disclosure, I own ActM shares so my guess is likely overflowing with bias - unintentionally of course.

Indeed, its the same company now, I totally missed that.

It makes no sense to estimate their total output at 24TH though, considering thats the output of only a single of their top end machines. A very conservative guess would be at least 10x higher, and more likely 100x higher, though how much of that will happen in 2013 is probably anyone's guess.

Yeah not sure where that came from likely me misinterpreting some earlier cite.  I decided to move ActM, XCrowd, BTCGarden, and Labcoin to the "announced but unsure" category.  I just have found it very difficult to get any real information on the companies.  Some of them in my opinon, including ActMam, have circumstances which make me question if they will ever get to market.  Still if someone can find more details (tape out, contracts, designs, chip volume) I would be happy to be corrected.  To be perfectly honestly I haven't looked very close at AMC/VMC?, XCrowd, BTCGraden, or LabCoin.  They all appear to be very opaque and I would be willing to bet at least one if not all four never make it to market in any reasonable volume.

VMC/AMC seems legit. Have a look here:
http://www.easic.com/vmc-uses-easic-to-achieve-24-756-ths-bitcoin-miner/

easic is a real company, and they have designed the chip for them.

My guess is xcrowd is legit too, although I doubt they will have a compelling product in time.

Havent looked in to labcoin, but there seem to be plenty of posters who have, and have been in contact with them and are convinced its no con. That doesnt guarantee a timely product within spec, but Id expect them to ship something someday :)

this does not look good for the Jupiter's!

would you share your figures?

another player?  ???
http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/chinese-company-phoenix-technologies-increases-production-of-asic-chips-329528.htm (http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/chinese-company-phoenix-technologies-increases-production-of-asic-chips-329528.htm)
http://bitcoinminingcenter.com/products/

I am surprised that they would produce more chips because their pricing is not that great for their release timeline.

4 times more expensive and 8 times more power consumption than some 28 nm offerings

March is probably a bit pessimistic for Bitmine now, given they're taking pre-orders and claiming a 16 December ship date.

https://bitmine.ch/?product=coincraft-desk

This may also give an indication for volume:
https://bitmine.ch/?product=coincraft-ai-asic

If you buy the chips in bulk, they give prices for orders of up to 10K chips (400TH). That may be their entire production run, but that seems rather unlikely, since they would have no more chips to put in their own miners :).
2PH for the batch is probably a more sane guestimate.

Dear God, I knew asic mining would be trouble before BFL even announced their first chip, but even I had never anticipated THIS many asic vendors coming out with 28nm chips in roughly the same time. Even if only a fraction actually end up shipping, this is going to be one hell of a bloodbath!

It just goes to show you how many chip makers there are in the woodwork. And these really aren't the big boys either, imagine that.

Big or small doesnt really matter a whole lot here, considering how "simple" bitcoin asics are, at least compared to CPU's, SoCs or even GPUs.
Even if Intel/AMD/nVidia were to design one, Im sure they could make it a bit more efficient or faster, but the difference wouldnt likely be very big.

The real differentiator is the process tech, and with 28nm all these companies are pretty much on state of the art for whats available commercially.

Anyway, just saying I dont expect anything spectacular to happen after the transition to these asics. I doubt it will even make sense to invest in a 20/22 or 14nm maskset in the coming years.

I think process tech so far is the biggest factor to performance and efficiency but there are design benefits to be had as well.  Just look at what bitfury accomplished only on 55nm node.

When ASIC saturation occurs and that difficulty curve levels out again we will see the lower process nodes showing their faces as miners will want a bigger piece of the pie always and the only way to get that is through efficiency gains.

yeah, I just wonder if there will be a market to make good on the multi million dollar investment for a 20nm maskset.
By the time difficulty levels out, mining profitability will be so marginal, I cant see a lot of demand even if electrical efficiency of a new chip is substantially better (but not orders of magnitude better).
More likely is that the mining will shift towards miners with very cheap/free electricity.

To put it differently, if 55nm asics had been in production for a longer time and  the providers able to keep up with demand, allowing the market prices to approach production cost (which will happen inevitably), so that current difficulty would be 10-100x higher than it is today,   Im not even sure there would have been a viable market for 28nm products.

Anyway, we may or may not see another shrink one day, but we will never again see the difficulty explosion thats about to happen.  Fun times ahead :).

I patiently await the leveling off as well. :D

4-5PH by December... leveling off somewhere in January maybe feb.. but it'll be to late by then

It’s already too late if you believe the stats here:  http://blockchain.info/stats

Mining Profits
Operating Profit   $-1,542,928.64
Operating Margin   -272.43%   
Profit Margin **   -490.89%

In fact the graph (http://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin) shows that it has been too late since about July of this year.

/Frank

https://bitmine.ch

That chart needs to be redone.


Both of those assumptions are no longer accurate.

Here is a chart showing the theoretical network speed were miners can still achieve break even after one year, in function of electricity price and asic production cost (based on  hashfast's specs):

http://snag.gy/15E5o.jpg

Note that this is an "end game" simulation that assumes ASIC prices have come down as far as they reasonably can given the production cost. Current market prices are still orders of magnitude above that, so dont read that as if you can buy a cointerra rig for $5000 now and still break even when the network goes to 200PH.

More explanation and if you want to play the numbers, go here:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295270.msg3165594#msg3165594

$250 to $50 per TH/s?  The low end of that range is less than the cost of fabrication right, even in volume and with 100% yields?  Throw in other components, assembly, labor, and profit margin and we aren't going to see $50 per TH/s.  You might as well graph a chart showing $50 per PH/s.

Dont know yet. For hashfast's chip I get $90 per TH using these assumptions:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295270.0

But it remains to be seen if hashfast is the most efficient 28nm design and likewise, volume prices of $4000 per wafer might be a reasonable assumption today, but in one or two years, it will be down substantially. $2-$2.5K is a more typical wafer price once the process has matured.

Im not predicting $50 per TH, but I certainly wouldnt rule it out either.

I got to run but I will make some comments on your thread later.  I think it is an interesting idea I just think some of the lines may be optimistic to the point of lacking utility.

Another day, another asic announcement (blackarrow, apparently well known and with good rep for selling bitcoin FPGAs):
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.0

Also for completeness, labcoin posted some numbers, they are shooting for 500TH by december:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=263445.msg3148724#msg3148724

scam or no scam, who knows, but you can ask that of many companies.

scam or no scam they can't even post a mining address...

1 PH actually only means 10M$ for a 51% attack at a rate of 10$/GH...

What would be a "healthy" relationship between the value of the safe and the money in it?

Hm, seems like the main assumption my foreward was based on, is actually a misinterpretation and wrong (?):


*edit:
...hm...when thinking twice it does not make sense.
450TH/s divided by 0,4TH/s (Jupiter spec at this time) = 1125 Jupiters and no saturn, no mars

In the beginning those numbers in the cart were  set to 3000 in case my memory doesn't play tricks on me
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=170332.msg2635325#msg2635325


*edit2:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&ie=UTF8&prev=_t&sl=es&tl=en&u=http://www.nyteknik.se/nyheter/innovation/forskning_utveckling/article3759919.ece
"Customers have already ordered several thousand."
"According to Johan Rilegård the company has already received a few thousand orders for boxes"

Very interesting question. Anyone got stats?

Pre-order is completely nothing but the first real 500Th/s can be possible by Kncminer due to the shipping. but for caution note. Since there are many problem for the current model. If you like to win, two methods must be used at the same time.

Bitfury is shipping these early:

http://www.bitfurystrikesback.com/product/bitfury-reel-fifo/

that's 9 TH-s per reel...

How many reels are they delivering?

I had no problems adding 1000 reels to my cart. I may have some problems coming up with the €83,700,000 needed to find out if they actually ship :)

Anyway, 9TH in a box is kinda cool.

I wonder if that is a poorly coded web cart or a true indicator of the number of reels they are shipping. I'd go with the former.

Now that Bitcointalk is back up... How are these projections coming along?

Any major changes that should be noted?

so far KnC seems to ship less than guesstimated (and slower)
Cointerra is already late on tape out as it seems: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=269093.msg3337524#msg3337524
Hashfast statement is 'shipping Oct. 20-30th' but: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=262052.msg3340500#msg3340500

I think it's safe to say that Hashfast is already late too and no i'm not hunting posts and i don't want to get into an argue with troll wannabe cypherdoc.

I wish to give my 2 satoshis, but not exacty sure how network speed converts roughly to difficulty.
Can I calculate 1PH/s = 150 MM difficulty and 10PH/s = 1500 MM difficulty? (Please correct if Im calculating this absolutely wrong?)

Closer to 1 PH/s = 140 MM difficulty but yes there is a direct linear relationship between difficulty and network hashrate.

So, are we accounting for all the horribly inefficient avalon hardware coming offline in a few months due to power cost?

why do you think one would turn off mining gear ? because its irrelevancy. if it is irrelevant, there´s nothing to account.  ;)

I don't think Avalon's gear will be enough of the network to make a difference by the time it comes offline.

Just like GPUs when they came off the network.  Didn't see any dip there either.

Hey there DeathAndTaxes, do you suppose we could post some difficulty estimates on the first page of this thread?

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#What_network_hash_rate_results_in_a_given_difficulty.3F

Hashrate = Diff * 2^32 / 600

There are difficulty estimates on the first page.  Not sure what you are asking?

It's 500TH according to the first page - a decent hunk.  Especially in Europe, power cost is going to kill it (assuming 0.30 USD/kwh, 1.4 billion diff is breakeven on power).  By 3 billion or so, it will also be basically dead in the US.

Of course, all this assumes current pricing - it could change.

500TH will only be a few percent of the total hashrate when it comes offline, but I think it will still be noticeable versus GPU -> ASIC.

Updated to reflect increased HashFast order book (2.24 PH/s excluding IceDrill all batches combined).  Reduced KNC Sept/Oct back to 0.6 PH/s (1500 reported units @ 300 TH/s average - mixed units).   Estimated  KNC Nov batch @ 2 PH/s.

Is the KNC Sept/Oct number for unshipped items only, or their entire first batch? Because if you read the KnC blog, I get a total of 2385 units already shipped and "one good day" worth of production pending (presumably >400).

Can you provide a link?  Hmm.  I don't have a link handy but in KNC thread I do recall them indicating ~500 shipped with ~1000 to go.  Maybe that was orders not units.  If the first batch was indeed 2700 units the hashrate should be updated (nearly double).

Have I missed where the hashfast orderbook increased?  Can you throw a hapless miner a linky?

https://www.kncminer.com/news?page=2

10/11 "So far the factory has produced about 700 products, while it seems a lot we were hoping for more by now,"

The rest is here:

https://www.kncminer.com/news

Yesterday the factory produced and shipped 350 boxes
Yesterday in the factory we had 455 boxes
The factory produced 280 boxes yesterday.
Ok so after a weekend of producing boards and over 600 boxes shipped in the last few days I have imported the last of the October orders into the production Queue, If the factory have a good day tomorrow they should be able to completely finish the Order queue for all orders that had an October shipment.

its not entirely clear if that 600 figure also includes some of the ones reported earlier, but judging by the numbers and dates, 5 days after the previous shipping update, I guess it does not.

Total is 2,385 + one good day.

Actually unless they didn't ship anything on 10/14 it is probably closer to 3000.

10/24 -
10/23 - "with good day ~400 units?" should be finished
10/22 - ?? "600 boxes shipped in last few days"
10/21 - ??
10/18 - ??
10/17 - 280 boxes shipped
10/16 - 455 boxes shipped
10/15 - 350 boxes shipped
10/14 - ??
10/11 - 700 product total since start

So the "600" probably refers to 18th, 21st, and 2nd.  That leaves 10/14 as a unknown so unless nothing shipped we can guestimate it was probably 200-400 more units.

So 700 + 300 + 350 + 455 + 280 + 600 (3 days) + 400 (one final good day) = ~3085.  I will round to 3000 units. 
Assuming 350 GH per avg unit (mix of Jupiter, Saturn, Mercury) that 1 PH/s.

Thanks Puppet.

Those big red ads all over the place make me very not-interested in spending any time reading that thread.

Cointerra is the only one that is competing on price and hash, and this is their V1. I first upgraded 2m GPU to 20M asicminer just to get my ,03 a day. I'll continue to run them until they produce less then 20 cents a day. Looks like I'll have to upgrade again to 200M just to keep up, but I refuse to pay the ongoing prices, in particular the pre-order ones. One thing is to spend a few hundred just to have a hobby, the other is spending thousands These hardware vendors are crazy, they are sure making a kiling. Want to see if they are going to lower their prices to compete with Cointerra  and the much higher diff. Ebay is already flooded with BFL going at bellow the last of their prices. If the network hash is going to run as much as you forecast this is going to stop being a hobby for many to being a big business. Save your BTC, they will become very rare to mine.

I think in time all vendors will cut prices in good time.  Vendors want high prices, customers want low prices eventually the demand will dry up and with it the cashflow.  The only way to get customers to open their wallets will be lower prices.      To be fair Cointerra doesn't have lower prices because they are "nice" it is because they are last.  $10 per GH isn't going to fly with a "late Dec" = industry talk for Jan (or later) delivery.   To move units they have to be cheaper because they certainly aren't going to be earlier.

My guess is when KNC and HF open up January orders either they will be priced aggressively or the market will simply not commit.  

Why would you estimate KnC November to be so high?  A lot of people are probably getting refunds.  It would be the smart thing to do while KnC allows it.

Based on probable die size and wafer batch size.  If KNC gets too many refunds they will lower prices to sell more units.   The general version of this idea is that once chips are ordered (not by customers but by company from the foundry) it is very unlikely they won't end up hashing eventually.  Anecdotally I haven't seen much chatter on large number of refunds requests yet. Denial is a powerful thing.

Still the purpose of the list is not to be the "end all be all" official number but a starting point.  If you think the KNC Nov batch will be smaller then adjust the total accordingly.  Still the network is getting so large that even if KNC batch was half that size we are still probably looking at 11 to 13 PH/s by end of year.

10days ago there had been more than 2003 Jupiters available, now it's down to 1855 and I assume there are more new orders in general than refunds - but this is just an assumption.

Where did you get the info about how many Jupiters were bought?

The only thing I know for sure is that this amount has been ordered, no clue about whether it has been paid and will be shipped.
Meanwhile refunds might take place, so the amount can be lower than expected.

Add 2000 Jupiters to your cart and click reclaculate, then you will be told that in this very moment
"there are only 1849" left.

I think subject like states quite realistic diff estimate. Maybe it goes roughly Jan 2000, Feb 3000 March around 5000 and then increase slows down significaly, but eventually  doubles again to 10.000 MM, but who knows when! Maybe by end of the next summer?

I really hope your pre-orders arrive on time. Every day I hear another company postponing delivery.

If all the companies postpone by 1-2 months the roi-calculations stay pretty much the same cause we see then also a postponed diff-increase by 1-2 months.

Diff increase has to be fueled by someone and if those companies have delays then the diff-increase has also delays.

D&T:  With all this information in hand (I thank you), what is your prognosis for the state of the mining sector in 6 months?  Which do you see giving way, BTC FX Rate (upward), Hardware Pricing (Way down) or Difficulty finally leveling off or declining?  Basically which of these mechanism will breakdown to possible compensate for the deluge of hardware coming online?

Your thought?



Thanks,
Dalkore

Predicting mining 6 months out is like trying to predict today what the weather will be in 2089. However here is my guess.  

First I have always been in the "price drives difficulty but difficulty doesn't drive price" school of thought.  So all of the following is basd on price being relatively stable (say $200 +/- 20% long term with no more than +/-35% in the short term).  If exchange rate moves up or down significantly and "sticks" (i.e. falls to $100 and stays there for weeks/months) then you can expect the following to be pushed higher or lower respectively.

For Q1-2014.
I think we will see pretty aggressive hashrate growth in Q1 of 2014.  If the estimate holds and we are roughly 12 PH/s on 01/01/2014 my best guess is that will rise to at least 30 PH/s over the next three months.  As an upper limit I am reluctant to put one but if I had to pick a number I am fairly confident I would say less than 60 PH/s.  This is simply because there is a lag in chip ordering and thus hashrate growth is constrained by wafer batch size.  While in theory an ASIC company could order hundreds or even thousands of wafers I doubt any ASIC company wants the risk of holding a small fortune in chips in the event something happens to Bitcoin and/or mining.   So no matter how delusional miners are I think there will be cap on how fast (not how high but how fast) hashrate will rise.  

Without significant exchange rate increase I don't see mining companies being able to sell the amount of rigs necessary to push hashrate up another >20PH/s (for visualization that is >20,000 KNC Jupiters).   If we are looking at 20 to 50 PH/s added in Q1 at $10 per GH/s thats $250M to $500M.  I don't think there are that many rich people who are bad at math.   Even $4 per GH/s is $80M to $200M which is likely too high given the annual mining revenue and amount of existing hardware so my guess is hardware prices are going down a lot in early 2014.  I expect every major vendor to be <$3 per GH/s with prices heading closer to sub $2 per GH/s as the quarter progresses.  The vendors with the most aggressive pricing may be pushing up against $1 per GH/s.   I would be surprised to see <$1 per GH/s for complete "ready to mine" systems although raw ASICS in bulk (chips on a reel) might get that low.

For the miners who thought power doesn't matter and bought rigs in countries with high power rates (>$0.10 per kWh) we probably will see a lot of used hardware up for sales.  This will be a migration of hardware from high cost miners to low cost miners albeit at a significant price reduction.  This will be more frequent with lower efficiency rigs (anything worse than 1 J/GH).  This resale of hardware to lower cost miners will increase its economic lifespan and ensure difficulty isn't going down (other than minor fluctuations).  It isn't until an Avalon rig is paying more than the value of a BTC in electicity in low cost areas that equipment will be retired.   At current exchange rate that isn't going to happen until north of 30 PH/s.

I also think more than one vendor will go bankrupt, be exposed as a fraud, or simply exit the space in the quarter.  There might be a new entrant or two but net-net the number of vendors will shrink.  Margins will be falling and competition increasing.  The weaker players probably won't make it.  It wouldn't surprise me to see an OEM type arrangement emerge (i.e. AMD doesn't make graphics cards, they make GPUs and sell them to a dozen or so OEMs who make graphics cards) with one or more vendors simply supplying SHA-2 processors not complete systems to a handful of OEMs.

For Q2-2014.
Your guess is as good as mine.  To be honest, even the Q1 outlook should just be taken as my opinion but I think it is at least grounded in probable events.   Going beyond a full quarter out is just throw a dart at the board territory.

Very well put sir.

The one thing I'd like to add is that KnC has said that they will be putting out a second generation of mining hardware in Q2 of 2014 after halting shipping for December January and February; I think that we can expect this new miner to be the biggest and baddest mo-sucka on the market, and it's going to have to be. With the network hashrate pushing up against 20+ PH, we're looking at 1 TH of mining power being worth maybe 2 BTC long term if it first comes online in March 2014.

I see the price of bitcoin rising another 10x by the end of 2014, so the mining hardware game will keep on keeping on. Month over month growth is going to slow substantially, but general point is that the hardware that is turning profits toward the middle of next year has not even been sold yet.

IIRC KNC said they would be halting sales if every single other vendor did the same.  It was an empty promise.  No other vendor will be doing so and thus KNC will be shipping units every single month.

As for the size of future units well that gets interesting.  It is unlikely sub 28nm processors will hit the market before 2016 (maybe late 2016).  The hashpower of an individual unit is going to be capped by efficiency.  All current 28nm offerings are around 0.8 J/GH at the wall.  Given multiple smart teams ended up around the same place without undervolting/underclocking I don't think efficiency is going to get significantly better on 28nm platform.

So at 0.8 J/GH at the wall and standard US household outlet being limited to 1440W continual load that limits capacity to 1440/0.8 = 1.8 TH/s.   If efficiency improves to say 0.7 J/GH it is 2.0 TH/s and 2.4 TH/s at 0.6 J/GH.

Units will get cheaper but I don't expect individual units to get much bigger than Cointerra rig.  That is pretty much pushing what a non-dedicated branch circuit can handle.

There's a big difference in efficiency between Cointerra and KnC, so I suspect that KnC will make up this difference in their second batch. They rushed those 28nm chips out and were successful, now they can spend some time tweaking them to get them better while their competitors play catchup. There are a lot of hardware errors on those chips as well, so I expect that they will be able to make significant gains from Gen 1 to Gen 2 of their chips.

Moral of the story is that the hashing power will keep going up. A story hit the wire the other day about BitPay processing a $1m order to ButterFly Labs, this was no doubt for Monarchs, so there's that hashing power coming online once it is released... 2014 will continue to be a bloodbath, but at least the network will be stable and secure!

The analysis is for sure describing a feasible scenario. And I share your concerns regading validity of such a forecast. One thing that came to my mind which can mess up such scenarios completely (and I'm sure there are tons of other imponderabilities that could be considered...) is the possibility to redistribute the hashing power to other crypto currencies once it is no longer profitable to let the ASICs mine Bitcoins.
Some miners might continue mining Bitcoins just because they believe the price will rise. But in that case it would be better to simply buy the Bitcoins at an exchange and mine a more profitable coin ;)
There are some other crypto coins using PoW and SHA256. One candidate which lately had a bit of an increased difficulty e.g. is Peercoin (which has not only PoW, but PoS as well; albeit the PoW is "Bitcoin compatible") and there are several others which might (or might not) be financially rewarding ;)

Phoenix Technologies new update
http://www.sbwire.com/press-releases/phoenix-technologies-increase-batch-size-of-bitcoin-mining-hardware-373334.htm

So even the scammers are upping their (non existent) volume lol.

nice explanation and forecast of difficulty, thx man. I can see that no miner is vorth of buying anymore

And this ^^^ is why the hashrate increase we are talking about in this thread won't occur for quite a while.
No one is interested in buying anything new right now...there is a glut of supply and no demand until things rebalance themselves.  

There is going to be little market left for new mining equipment in the near future.

I would guesstimate that almost all of the current undelivered customers are smartly considering refunds at this point.

Miners these days have zero tolerance for mining at a loss.

Will the 2014 buyer be a guy mining at home?

Somebody looking to own 0.01% of the 20P network hashrate (what a Monarch buyer is trying to get in today's 4P network - but sadly will end up with 10th of that) will be interested in a 2T miner, but won't the bigger players be willing to buy as big as can be made?  They won't be limited by electrical infrastructure.

The point is that mining is perfectly parallel.  It makes little sense selling a 6 TH/s unit for dedicated power connections and a 2 TH/s unit for "the home guy".  Just make a ton of 2 TH/s units and the small miners buys 1 or 2 and the big miners buys 100.  Higher economies of scale, less supply chain complexity, and higher margins.

The only reason for multiple units is when a customer can't afford the unit price but as the price per GH/s falls that becomes less of an issue.

I would guess most customers can't get a refund or at a minimum vendors make if very difficult.  Those ordering early even with credit cards are likely beyond the chargeback window.  Even KNC which had the most liberal refund policy went no refunds because orders were "in production" the last of the oct orders didn't ship until 3 weeks after they went "in production".

Still even if every miner got a refund the chips have in most cases already been purchased by the foundry.  It would be bad news for vendors because they likely would need to lower prices to sell the same chips again but either they would or they would mine themselves.

If the numbers are right and >10 PH/s of chips have already been ordered from foundries then it is only a matter of time before those chips are hashing (by someone, somewhere).

Monarch is delayed (shocking!, lol), but this may raise some eyebrows:
"we should be able to product more than 1000 Monarchs per day. "
https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/4414-monarch-information.html#post63779

Thats 12PH worth of 600GH monarchs (the 300GH model was only added later) per month.
Of course this says nothing about how much they actually sold, theoretically its possible they only sold 2 weeks worth of production and may not produce and sell more than that ever, but I kind of doubt that.

sure, BFL and 1.000 devices a day...AND they would ship them instead of mining with them oh their own as happened before...dunno why I can't believe it.  ::)

They do more pr than engineering and they are dying. They currently try everything to survive, like send themselves a million through bitpay for some attention of news, claim ridiculous numbers and such for implying *there are soooo many BFL-customers out there, become one today ourself*  in order to suck new guys in joining the game lately.

I dont understand why people draw such conclusions. The reason it takes 6+ months for them to ship your order is not because they have no orders, nor because they would self mine in any meaningful way. Simple evidence for that is the network speed, and the fact it doesnt make a lot of sense in the first place. Self mining is no where near as profitable as selling these devices.

The ridiculous long delays is just a combination of incompetence, unwillingness (slow shipping=low network difficulty=high perceived profitability=more preorders) and the sheer amount of orders they did get. Any other company would have stopped taking orders ages ago if they could not ship them in a reasonable time, but BFL keeps advertising and raking in orders they know they will never have to ship, since next year the import tax and electricity alone would make it silly for most customers to accept their 65nm product, and most of them will be switched to "mining by the GH".

BFL are devious, deceitful/dishonest, but they are not stupid, not bankrupt, not selfmining and not short on orders.

Why shouldn't they selfmine since only Paypal customers can get refunds? Considering their way of doing business it actually makes sense that they would mine for a period of time before sending the units out. Customers can't do anything about it and.

never heard about Phoenix Tech... their X3 model should mine at 1 TH/S with a Power Consumption of 650 W, this would mean 0.65W/GHs, to good to be true considering what D&T said a few posts above, and I have no reason to doubt his estimate on this matter :P

Until recently BFL were the main provider of mining hardware. Arguably even today they are still the biggest provider. Had they mined with their sold but unshipped supposedly delayed hardware, two things would have happened:
- Difficulty would have shot up before they began shipping. We didnt see anything of the kind
- They would have shot themselves in the foot. One of the main reasons BFL did so well is that they started accepting preorders in august 2012 and didnt ship (or deploy) a single asic until, what was it, may 2013? Thats almost 10 months during which difficulty was low and mostly flat and prospective customers who used a mining calculator were willing to almost pay the weight of these machines in gold. Self mining would have dramatically reduced the perceived value of these machines. Even if they had the hardware, it would have been smarter to turn it off.

Now today you might argue it "makes sense" because BFL's impact on difficulty is dwindling, but then so is the profit potential of 65nm hardware. They claim to be shipping 1000 units per day now, even if its only half that, just how many days worth of production do you think fits in their datacenter? Its just not worth the bother if you can make fortunes selling vaporware and $250 worth of hardware for $2500. There is a reason Avalon, Bitfury, asicminer are all mainly selling gear, its simply more profitable than mining (and their margins arent even close to BFL's margins).

This +1.  AFAIK they tested / burned-in off main net, and were just super-slow at shipping.  I've seen no actual evidence of self-mining, even though people seem to like to think it happened (BFL also eats babies, BTW).  If you have some evidence of this, please post it!

6/1/13, network hash rate 156T.  10/1/13, network hashrate 1450T.

3% to 5% fluctuations in network hashrate on a daily basis.  Someone "hiding" 2% of the network hashrate would not be discovered.

So say a vendor builds 1T daily for its customers, but delays shipping by 3 days.  It can now hash with 3T paid for by customers.

Add 200G daily to the self-mine and you add 1T weekly to your self-farm, all paid for by customers.  ("we're shipping 800G daily, we're great".  Yeah, right.)

At the end of four months the vendor has 20T on the network, paid for by customers. ("we shipped 100T, we're great".  Yeah, right.)   A blip on the difficulty at 1.5%, but good for $10,000 daily in coinbase, $3.5 million annually, paid for by your customers, thanks.

Proof? none.  Do I believe it could be true? absolutely.  Are there 20T of customer's miners unshipped? plenty of threads say so.  Destroying the customer faith and future sales? not judging by 28nm "product" pre-orders. Unethical? yes ... that's the fun part.

EDIT:  They could even say, "we reserve 20% of our mfg capability for our own equipment, nothing wrong with that".  I guess, although 20T of customers waiting for miners paid for 8 months ago might disagree.

Update on November orders from KnC:
Saturns sold out
Jupiters very close to sold out, 46 left right now


guess we'll see another 2,5PH/s added during November..

Update KNC sept/oct to 2 PH/s.  Asked for clarification on their "70% of all coins" press release.  It is unclear what the 70% refers to.  Is it hashrate at the time of the press release.  70% of the average hashrate since they started shipping?

As the network was 1.3 PH/s before KNC started shipping and was ~4 PH/s at the time of the statement the upper bound would be 2.7 PH/s (that would be if nobody else shipped a single GH/s since 1 Sept).  If we look at 70% being the average hashrate from the time they started shipping that would be ~2 PH/s.   70% of the peak hashrate would be 2.8 PH/s which would be impossible.    So my best guess is KNC shipped 2 to 2.5 PH/s in Batch 1.  This would mean the made up 70% to 80% of the hashrate increase since 1 Sept and all other competitors were 20% to 30%.


My guess is that Nov batch is probably the same size.  This is based on nothing more than hopefully KNC knows their own limitations and it took >2 weeks to deliver the first batch thus it probably will take at least 2 weeks to deliver the second one.  If the second batch is significantly larger (say 50%+) than the first the Nov orders will roll into Dec.

So based on the order count and the Sept/Oct batch I agree we probably are looking at another 2.0 PH/s to 2.5 PH/s shipping in Nov.  I left it at 2 PH/s for now but will adjust upward based on clarification of the size of the Sept/Oct batch. Those wishing to be more pessimistic should add 1.0 PH/s to the total to account for higher Sept/Oct and Nov batch sizes.

I tottaly agree with you but i dont think that they will sell the rest of them now with dofficulty like this

They sold out of Saturns and have <200 Jupiters compared to >2,000 two weeks ago.

with so many sales and pre-orders announced shouldn't the diff be much higher by now? Something is not adding up. As BFL was shipping the 1.5T machines the diff went like nuts, but I suspect all of these companies are not forthcoming with their sales, in fact I suspect they are lying on the sales numbers. Or that or the machines are breaking after a few days/weeks of mining.

Um you didn't notice the 2.5 PH/s rise in difficulty over the last month which just happens to coincide with KNC Sep/Oct order shipments?

preorder =/= already mining.  If it was then difficulty would be 15 PH/s right now and there would be no need for this thread you could just look at a hashrate chart.

KNC Nov batch won't be shipping until Nov 15th.
HashFast batch1 won't be shipping until mid Dec.
etc.

Obviously hashrate shipping in the future can't already have affected the hashrate right?

KnC hasnt been shipping for 2 weeks and will only resume next week I believe
HF isnt shipping anything yet and wont until december
CT isnt shipping anything yet and wont until december or january
Actm isnt shipping yet and wont until december or january
Bitmine isnt shipping yet and wont until december or january
Black arrow isnt shipping yet and wont until February
BFL Monarch isnt shipping yet and, well, who knows really.

You get the idea.
The only thing thats still shipping right now (allegedly) is 65nm BFL miners, but they dont have much bite anymore, and perhaps some bitfury boards and USB miners.

not a BFL defender, but as they caught up with their 1.5T machines shipments the diff raised during that same time. Coincidence? Don't know, I have no idea of how many 1.5T machines they shipped. Avalon was supposed to have shipped ~1000 Ts, BFL is unknown. Asicminer probably around 100 Ts. Sorry, but it doesn't add up on my book,  I suspect these companies are lying on their actual shipped ASICs. Just in my honest opinion.

The thread is about orders not shipments.   Still you listed <2 PH/s and the network is ~4 PH/s you and you said it doesn't add up?

For the record no company has every in black and white stated how much they shipped.  Ever.  The are very opaque about that and if anything they have a huge incentive to lie to the downside.  Say a company said "yup we are shipping 1 PH/s per week and have orders booked for the 20-30 weeks" (it doesn't matter if they are lying or telling the truth) do you think that would make it easier or harder to sell more rigs?

the network is ~3.7. We'll see if when they start shipping if the network rises accordingly to the announced orders. If it does the network hash rate should rise at least to the numbers stated by OP

Unless the OP is wrong.  There is no announced orders.  The title contains the word "estimate" for a reason.

None. BFL never shipped a 1.5 TH/s machine.

I agree with you, about their sales numbers

User "Hank" wrote an excellent piece on difficulty speculation
http://forum.cointerra.com/threads/difficulty-speculation.44/

Hank missed a crucial little detail: DnT's list is anything but exhaustive and "??" does not equal zero.

For instance I dont know how many Monarchs BFL is going to ship, but I do know it will very much be a non zero number. There are also no known numbers (and no estimates) for KnC post November, or hashfast post december, Cointerra post January,  but somehow I doubt all these companies will close shop and retire. Particularly for next year, the list should be considered a minimum minimorum, its basically what we know but for the most part it doesnt contain estimates for "known unknowns", let alone unkown unknowns (think 28nm Bitfury chips or similar surprises).

edit: as illustration of my point, here is another "surprise":
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=330665.0

No word yet of what volume they could achieve, but it looks fairly legit and specs are on par with Bitfury.

I've input all those numbers into my diff estimation spreadsheet to reflect shipping dates of various manufacturers, see https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqGoWjATRQK6dE1yTHpydkIwajhhUGF4ZGxFV2FDSVE&usp=sharing
Those estimates are intended to be copy pasted into http://coinplorer.com/Hardware/Simulate (choose "manual difficulty extrapolation") for revenues estimates.
The spreadsheet is intended to be a base on which you can add/correct your own estimates. I already know that you won't agree with some points, but I had to make decisions :D
Improvements I could made in the spreadsheet or the estimates are more than welcome :)

What's the summary?

2.1B difficulty by end of December 31, 2013?
3B by end of January 31, 2014?
4B by end of February 28, 2014?

35 PH/s = 5 B difficulty?

Well it looks like Cointerra will miss.  Hashfast is unknown.  Not sure how much of KNC Nov run is left but I would guess it is mostly complete.  My guestimate was ~2 PH/s and we saw a nice bump from 5 PH/s to > 7 PH/s between 5 DEC and today.   My assumption is most of that is KNC "Nov run".  If Hashfast misses we probably are going to come in under 1.8 PH by end of year.

Nobody else appears to be shipping in the volume necessary to move the needle.  I mean at 7 PH/s even dropping a PH/s on the network is barely a 15% increase in diff and that would need to be a pretty fast rollout to happen in one adjustment.

I think 1.4 to 1.8 billion difficulty by end of year is more likely.  Beyond that into 2014 it becomes harder to guess.  January & February is likely going to be brutal between HashFast (batch 1, 2, MPP and upgrades), Cointerra (batch 1 & 2), plus the maybe BFL Monarch near the end of February.  If BFL misses I think difficulty doubling is likely.  If BFL ships in volume it probably will be more like triple.  Beyond that I think the adjustments are going to slow down but really going more than 2 months out is just a guess anyways.
  

Okay. Thanks. That's sort of re-assuring. Wouldn't want to buy any of these miners if difficulty goes beyond 5 billion.

With those difficulty estimates, what would you say 1TH could mine (per month), by say April-May? If you estimate the diff @ 4billion by April, that should be alittle over 3btc per month. How far off do you think this is??

Avalon2 chips from official Chinese supplier http://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a1z10.1.w6461276-4508018524.1.ebCzQZ&id=18754154224 : 66295 sold in the last 30 days

Cointerra sold out their March batch, and is now on April 2014.  You should add these to the list.

Black Arrow also sold out their Feb batch, also on April now.

That's it, I can't buy anything since it seems like difficulty is going to exceed 5 billion by then.

you might want to consider doing a group buy on someone's whose expecting shipment of hardware and just hold off on doing a larger investment on purchases until the NEXT NEXT gen of hardware is coming.

I think BA reopened its Feb batch. I just purchased another X-3 tonight and it said 2/24 shipping, so hope its right..

Actually, I'm seriously thinking of doing alt coins. Then just trade them for BTC.

Some new numbers from KnCMiner
https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-72 (https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-72)
http://newsbtc.com/2013/12/14/kncminer-sold-28-million-worth-neptune-bitcoin-miners/ (http://newsbtc.com/2013/12/14/kncminer-sold-28-million-worth-neptune-bitcoin-miners/)

For somebody offering products that cost thousands of dollars, they need to spend a little bit more time learning how to type.

Well if I am reading that right it is at least 3.6 PH/s.  1,200 *3 TH/s.  KNC also has been pretty conservative with their estimates so I think it could easily be 4 PH/s or more.

It's actually double that.

1200 units @ $10k for prior customers (sold out) and 1200 units @ $13k for the general public (also sold out). That's where the $28 million dollar number comes from.

That's 2400 units *3 TH/s which is at least 7.2 PH/s and could easily be 8 PH/s or more. I don't believe your OP includes these Neptunes yet.

Yes you are right.  And no the OP # don't include these (and many other 2014 runs).  The original purpose was to estimate year end difficulty.  When I get some I time I will try to update it for 2014.  Many of the existing pre-order runs have been completed in full so we can look at current difficulty + undelivered future orders going forward.

Any chance someone has time to update this thread?

I don't have the time to maintain this.  I am very busy through the end of the year.  Still the original goal was served.  It gave us a ballpark through the end of the year and when people were making insane predictions (<2 PH/s in Dec or >100 PH/s by Dec) it got us within shooting distance of reality.

Honestly it probably makes sense to start a new thread for Q1-2014, link to this and use it a template for projecting pre-orders over the next 3-6 months.  Going beyond that is really just rolling dice.

I will do it - dont bite me ;)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=387533.0

So, predictions were quite accurate. If Hashfast wasn't late 2 weeks, hashrate certainly would be close to 13PH. It's 10PH now, at the begining of the year it was ~22TH. It's 454 times more. 1EH at the end of the year possible? I don't think so... What about you guys?

Hashfast still isn't shipping, their last statement on 12/31/2013 stated certain last minute production problems and suspended shipping.

Well, somebody is shipping..  I hope it's HF, otherwise, it's unexpected hash, now over 11Phs

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/assets/difficulty/bitcoin-hash_rate.png?1388602822

unexpected hash

November Jupiters as well.

HF start shipping 31.12/13 https://twitter.com/HashFast

I have the 25th unit and it didn't ship.  So HashFast "shipped" a token number of units (potentially as little as 1 BabyJet & 1 Sierra) to say they are "shipping".  My guess is they didn't even ship 3 units but I know for a fact at the absolute most they only shipped units prior to mine which would be a staggering 24 units or ~10 TH/s.  For all practical intents and purposes they haven't shipped anything.

Still nothing in the mail from HashFast, DeathAndTaxes? I see they tweeted a pretty picture but no further talk of shipping since New Year's Eve.

Does anyone here have (or can any of you point me at) updated projections for Jan or Q1 for overall ASIC shipments?

Or any news from Cointerra? Is there a new thread and I've just missed it?

They shipped 2(two) units. One to IceDrill https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=269216.msg4254717#msg4254717 and one was sent to Luke-Jr for development.

looks like 1ph jump in one day, could not be shipped miners. It looks like either some manufacturer is doing 'test' or very deep pocket player turn on his farm.
It is scary to think that there might be mining development happening without any news.

That should be the assumption you make when entering this game. Someone, somewhere, out there is making a farm. Then turning it on. Then it grows as time goes on.

Well, if that the case one can forget about getting bitcoin miner at least if profit is concerned. This game is getting riskier each day as more and more interest getting into bitcoin.

It is 13ph now at bitcoinwisdom. Hash train never stops, why bitcoin train does not move like this? >:(
From the chart below, it looks more like hash rocket
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png

Update from Cointerra interesting photos
http://cointerra.com/engineering-update-asic-bringup-diagnostic-testing/

Hey great thread.
Is it still going to be updated with 2014 rollouts?

edit:
I don't have much to add but I think knc have 3x1200 neptune batches @3TH & it was posted that cointerra were doing 5000 unit batches so @ 2TH I would assume, they are already sold out till may. I will try and confirm these numbers if thread is going to be kept up to date.

Hash rocket? Hash rocket was from July 2010 to July 2011.
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png

Hash train Choo! Choo!
http://www.coindesk.com/coinseed-5m-investment-bitfury-mining/ (http://www.coindesk.com/coinseed-5m-investment-bitfury-mining/)

OT I know but...

This is a worrying statement: "In the future, a lot of these large merchants are going to be in need of dedicated confirmation power to rapidly transact their sales.”  Does this mean that he envisions his clearing house only accepting transactions from clients and disregarding all others?  What would that do to the general network efficiency?  Would it lead to a situation similar to what breaking net neutrality would do?

You are the brilliant one D&T, am I reading too much into this?

Again sorry for the OT. 

Thanks for this, D&T. Solid analysis. Just to add my 2 Satoshis, Bitfury himself estimated that he would add at least .5Th/mo when his pilot project succeeded. I guess by now, as everyone realized what a huge success it was, he could have easily tripled or quadrupled his output. Who it goes to, God knows.

I know For sure that Q1 + Q2 there are coming some big farms operational .
As far as i know 8-12 PH total.
We buy chips direct form the suppliers and they have gave us some inside.

H

Slow ASIC manufacturers are in trouble if they cant come to market quickly.

Examples are the May batch Cointerra, Black Arrow and KNC.  From now to then the difficulty will go from to 2.6 to 10+++

Im sure part of the difficulty problem are some companies selling to insiders and wholesalers before the general public and mining for weeks before the products actually roll out (In addition to mining for themselves).   Examples BitFury, Asicminer, KNC, BFL.

Could be around .5 BTC mining first 2 weeks of May.

I don't think hashrate growth can continue on the same exponential curve for too much longer.  It'll still increase rapidly, but you won't see a doubling every month for two much longer - in order to keep up the pace for a year we'd need to see the network hit 102 exahashes, the equivalent of 200 million Jupiters.  Hashfast and Cointerra can't even manage to ship a few thousand of their units out in a couple months.

Mining will be a thing of the past by July.

Oh? Replaced by what?

It will be controlled by the big companies as it will be to unprofitable for the small people like us who are the last people in the loop to get the newest hardware. Especially with the explosion of cheaper hardware and millions of miners jumping on too late.

Probably replaced by trading the coins themselves.

In other words, mining is *not* a thing of the past, which is what I was trying to get you to point out.

But yes, whenever or wherever there's a chance to make money (even with slim margins), large organizations will slowly migrate over to it, consuming or crushing the small players in the process.

The conspiricey theory.

But lets make it any way we can now.

Reviving this old puppy and Bitcoin difficulty today is
6,119,726,089

Any estimates for the end of 2014
New Calculations should include AM next Gen Chips not sure what else is in the pipeline
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-small-lin.png