Bitcoin Forum

Newegg is sold out of every 6970 except one.  A week ago you could pick from a dozen. 

It seems like mining adoption is ACCELERATING despite the fall in price and the uptick in difficulty.  Amazing. 

I guess it makes sense though, how many other investments can offer a 100% ROI in about 4 months?  Until it takes a year or more to pay off the hardware, I doubt the adoption rate will slow. 

I agree with you that demand is still growing; however, that may change if this price drop holds and continues to slide.

I wouldn't necessarily blame it on the miners...the 6970 is a good card but I know a bunch of guys that are buying them to game on at the moment because of Battlefield 3 alpha.

Also, don't forget that old 5xxx cards are probably dying at some rate, so if 6970 cards weren't being sold, the rate would be dropping.

A smart person on this forum once did the calculations and realized we have almost no power to drive distributors out of stock on AMD cards. We are such a tiny fraction of GPU buyers compared to gamers it's funny.  AMD is just doing a damn good job selling great GPU's.

100% agree....as I stated above.  It isn't the miners doing this.

We drove them out of stock on the 5xxx series.  I personally drove my local Microcenter out of stock :)

Exactly.  Because we all know it's the gamers who are buying up all these cards.  But for some reason only the ATI/AMDs.  You can find nVidia cards every day all day.  Huh.. they must not be very good for gaming I guess.

Because we all know it's the miners who are buying up all these cards. But for some reason the difficulty is trending down.

You can see just how many of these recently purchased 6970s are mining by looking at the next difficulty prediction (http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php). If we did drive them out of stock it was a poor purchase decision it seems, because we're pushing it back towards 1784732 at the moment. Maybe if you wait a few days you'll be able to buy an open box version cheaper when all the panic sellers return some hardware.  :P

"But for some reason the difficulty is trending down."

Say what?

Difficulty hasn't gone down even 1% since Bitcoin hit the public eye -- let's say May 10th, 2011.

Most of us registered on or after that date. (And please, you 20 people who registered before then, don't chime in this thread with a roll call -- I know you exist, but MOST of us came in May or later)

The fact of the matter is: we have yet to see ANY difficulty decrease since Bitcoin became common knowledge.

You're probably looking at "instant" difficulty estimates which mean nothing. The current outlook is 1.94 up from 1.89 -- we're looking at another 10 or 11% increase about 12 1/2 days from the last one.

Instant here being x0.92, "Next" being x0.95. But a lot can change by August 16.

Ok, I see you're referring to

http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

I, on the other hand, was going by

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/

Which shows a projected increase.

Does anyone know how two sites could have access to the same data and yet come to such drastically different conclusions?

I agree that a lot could happen in the next week. For example, some people look at a prediction of stabilizing difficulty as a cue to go ahead and max out their NewEgg Preferred credit card.

Was able to pick up 3 more 6970's from amazon yesterday.  Still on the waiting list for 6990's though...

 ::) As always you choose your windows most carefully, there was a difficulty drop right before may, so of course it's "no drop since say, may", which has been all of 3 months time, and not at all indicative of any kind of trending (the entire time has been fairly exceptional).

In answer to your question however, the difference depends on the time period that the calculation is based upon. Sliding block window size, and all that jazz.  A common sense look would yield simliar thoughts however, as bitcoin charts reports 5.32blocks/hr solved, which would be a basis for expecting a decrease, or at least a much lower increase.

I expect the huge ass sell off price drop will lead to a slight decrease in difficulty myself though. Although I won my last bet on difficulty projections, I don't care to speculate just yet betting wise.

I don't quite understand why people are still buying mining hardware. Currently it will take about a minimum of 4 months to pay off one card.

I told you why I chose the beginning of May. It's when most of us found out about Bitcoin.

I don't care if a few hundred "early adopter" miners got to experience difficulty drops before May 2011 -- I'm talking about what MOST OF US have experienced since discovering Bitcoin.

You can like it or hate it -- but May 10th is a good dividing line between "most of us" and "hardly anyone". If you have a better suggestion, I'm all ears.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?action=mlist;sort=registered;start=8970

Sort by "Date Registered", and click on Page 300. That's May 6th. There are 1156 pages total. But I don't think 25.9% of the active membership here is on page 300 or before -- a TON of the users on Page 300 and earlier have 0 posts. And with any forum, you have a larger % of active members toward the "today" end of the list than the "forum grand opening" end.

I picked up 5 5850's for 145 each and you cant tell me that is not a bargain. I have tested each and the average between them is about 390 megahash. That's .208 a day for this difficulty. I recognize that the difficulty will increase but I'm going to stick with this for simplicity sake.

Now I'm not a dumb ass and I am not selling at the listed price of around 11 dollars. I agree selling at 11 dollars would take a long time to get your roi. I plan to hoard until the price goes up to between 15-20 dollars. So in 30 days I'll have 6.24 bitcoins which is $93 dollars at 15 a btc or $124 @ 20 a btc.

If you take the cost of electricity the card costs $7.2 a month (I pay 6.7c a kwh) That means $86 or 117

Also a months time is only two difficulty increases so my profits wont get drastically lower. Since in a months time the cards will be more then half paid for it still is 100% worth it.

the 145 for a 5850 deal is pretty much the only thing that was worth buying. Anything else now would be way overpriced because AMD is getting very overpriced due to the ridiculously high demand, and Nvidia's relatively low demand.

testing them and running them for days on end overclocked to the nuts are two very different things.
i would be hesitant to tell someone to expect more then 375 mh/s from a 5850 on average. A minor difference
from your 390 but it all adds up when discussing 5 of them.  For every time a card hangs and it takes you time
to realize it and fix it.. has to be factored into your mining results.

just my opinion. i realize some 5850s perform better then others but a 990-1000 core clock speed, stable for days and day,
is impressive on these 5850 cards.

This should be pretty stable though because they run at 75c and it isn't a 990-1000 clock speed. It only requires 960 mhz these days to get 390 megahash. Plus these aren't some shitty brand they are sapphire cards.

i prefer to run at 940 at 375 mh/s, sapphire btw, for simple stability reasons.
if you got a good batch of cards more power to you!

+1

That was indeed an incredible deal. Viva NCIXus.com!

I browsed Amazon/Newegg for what mining cards are in stock -- there's just nothing to get me off my seat.  70 to 80 days ROI is borderline; 120 is obviously much worse! And that's about the ROI for most 6XXX series cards.

@mike678 : Where the hell do you live to get electricity that cheap? Dammit, I am jealous  :)
Here in Germany mining has become nearly non-profitable.

You don't now economics. Most miners will sell at 11 dollars (still a very good profit) and you will be stuck with them when it goes to 10 then 9, 8, 7 etc.

The north east


We wouldn't be investing in bitcoins directly or mining if we didn't think the price was going to go up. I have seen plenty of people suggest buying bitcoins directly obviously those people think its the low end as well yet they don't get as much criticism.

Ultimately, what determines the profitability of mining is your actual sell price. I believe that the price of bitcoin will ultimately go up and therefore I can actually choose at what price I want to sell.

I'm still hilariously amused by the people who claim that paying off a card in 4 months is a bad idea.

Look at wall street, people consider a 5% positive ROI in a year as doing *very well*. Imagine that buying a card new depreciates its resale value instantly by 30%, if you pay off the card in 4 months, that's a 70% ROI in 4 months. Admittedly it's riskier, but isn't that the name of the game? Don't like risk, go invest in blue chips (not that they're doing great these days).

I don't want to keep motivating people to raise up my difficulty while my price is dropping, but let's get some perspective here, really.

That's a pretty big assumption, that bitcoin will return to $15-$20.  The trend over the past 3 months has been nothing but down.  Do you feel confident that enough new adopters will be found for bitcoin to drive the price up?  What do you see as the catalyst for this happening, aside from difficulty rate which is irrelevant to bitcoin's value?

There are a couple of differences here.  Investing in the shares of a company is not like investing in bitcoin: the company does something and creates value.  Bitcoin is just a commodity.  Graphics cards are essentially worthless after 2 years.  Increasing DirectX versions make previous card version obselete.  A card may pay off itself in 4 months, but don't forget the case, PSU, CPU, ram, storage, and motherboard required to make that card work.  Payoff time is now much longer. 

If I keep my $100 without spending it, how long until that $100 is free?

I feel like bitcoins will either be a huge success and go main stream or it will roll over and die. If it is a huge success and goes main stream it most likely will not stay at around $10 a btc. I'm here for the long haul and I'm willing to be patient and wait how ever long that may be. I'm not going to be the dude who spends 10k bitcoins on a pizza. I realize there's probably no chance for a jump that high but it's entirely possible people are selling for cheap now and in a month or two it will be back up.

In regards to bitcoins failing I don't mind because I'm a computer science major so this is my hobby. If I lose a grand or two it's not the end of the world because I thoroughly enjoy doing this.

The graphics cards may become valueless over time but I'm pretty sure a lot of people would be willing to take a 2 year old corsair psu thats gold rated. As long as you have some quality parts you will be able to get money back.
As for how long it takes to pay off a whole rig. My 5850's can give me enough bitcoins to be paid off in around 60 days. That's about half the cost of the server so in another 60 days I'll have enough bitcoins to finish off the costs. That's 4 months which isn't bad at all.

all these calculations are making assumptions that could quickly prove to be no longer valid.
BTC could be 6 dollars in 3 weeks. Difficulty could still go up in the meantime even if just a slow climb.
That ROI could stretch past a year... or never.

That is the risk we are all taking if we decide to buy some new gear today. And it seems to me the chances
of that happening are not so bad.

BTC could be six dollars in three hours...

Exactly. I was one of the people who started in early June. Thank goodness I have made quite a bit that
I can consider the experiment (investment?) successful. But I still have some hardware to pay off if I do not
sell it today and the time line to pay that off is a long long ways off at this current price of 8 dollars.

For example, if I have 800 dollars left to pay off and I am running at 2400 mh/s.. lets say that generates
a hypothetical 1 BTC a day for the next 100 days. Well multiply that 100 BTC times a price of 8 dollars and
I will be paid off. 100 days is 3+ months and I am not even taking into account my time, electricity, cooling,
possible hardware failure, outages from a card hanging or power loss, bad luck at a pool, etc..

So a some what conservative estimate would be 5-6 months to pay off when just several weeks ago that calculation
was much rosier when tossing in elect/cooling costs.

Pop in a price of 6 dollars.. and things just got worse.

We all run these calculations (i hope) when deciding to buy hardware but many people are not doing a worst case
scenario which appears to be taking place as I type this. Diff goes up, BTC price goes down. Welcome to bitcoin mining.

I never did any investments (except electricity) so this is extremely profitable.  8)

Boy, I hate being right...

Look on the bright side, a difficulty decrease is almost assured now! No use mining for a buck or so a day in the middle of summer here.

I fail to see your point. Explain.

I think he's trying to say that if you keep $100 dollars, it won't pay for itself. All you have is $100. If you buy mining equipment with $x, at some point, assuming it's profitable, you'll have mining equipment and $x.

In terms of interest that's almost 300%. 

I think that this concept uniquely appeals to us computer "techie" types as well.  The fact that we can build a machine that essentially "creates" money is compelling.....as is having an excuse to buy more stuff and get pretty brown boxes from newegg.

I understand the ROI for those professional miners, but for the casual guy like myself?  I'll get a 6990 as soon as I have enough bit coins to afford one, since my *primary* desire is for gaming, but the mining to "pay for it" is just a bonus, basically giving me a "free" gaming machine (once all my parts are added up).
 
If the gravy train some day dies, then I'll have my gaming machine still :D