Bitcoin Forum

And difficulty factor growth slows down. Seems that people are hanging up their rigs.

Even more pressure on the price then when the big rig investors get more coins to sell, they will probably not hoard any before they have made back their initial investment.

not many WTS hardware in the marketplace section

Still, we have lost 3 TH/s since yesterday. No small amount of power...

From where are you getting your data?

maybe it was just a luck factor?

The current price and difficulty may mean it's not operationally profitable due to electrical costs in some areas. But it doesn't mean all miners will dump their hardware immediately. Those who expect prices to go up again may continue or just rest their rig until difficulty drops and/or prices swing up.

or maybe they switched to mining namecoin :D

I look at the top of
http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/
and
http://bitcoinwatch.com/

Luck affects blocks found, not the total network hashrate.

The same for me.

Doesn't the total hashrate on BitcoinWatch usually fluctuate by that much anyway? I'm pretty sure people have mentioned it before and it has jumped all over the place.

Another note, DeepBit seems to have gone up by 100ghash/s in the last day :P

and how is total network hashrate calculated? ;)

it calculates by the speed of produced blocks, so if the network is more lucky overall, you will see total network's hashrate higher than it actually is.  

Can you imagine being a person who made a large investment making the assumption that
BTC would be around 15-20? In my opinion that was truly a poor decision. I would have done
that math based on a price of 5-7 and that would still have been pushing it a bit far with pricing.
Plus I work for an ISP and do not have to pay for electricity and cooling in the data center (thank
you very much kind owner).

I put about 2000 dollars into hardware that gets me about 2450 mh/s. And some of that money
was buying higher quality parts to replace an aging computer at home once I am done with mining.
Two computers were bought used for 400 each that contains two 5830s that I have overclocked
ridiculously to get 620 mh/s out of them per box. The other nicer setup contains 2 reference 6950s
and 1 used 5850 doing 1240 mh/s. All over clocked to the nuts.

Since June, about the 12th I was starting to get setup with the first box. I realized this could make some
money with the high BTC price and still somewhat low difficulty level. I quickly found a person in my state
getting out of bitcoin mining and bought two of his rigs used. The sooner the boxes were running for me
the better. Delaying was money lost obviously.

So.. here I am today and have made about 1050 dollars and some change (BTC). I have pretty much paid
off my new rig that will replace the one at home if I sell the rest of my BTC. The other two machines have
not even started being paid off yet. Naturally I could sell them for about 400 each and break even but I
will still plug along due to no elect/cooling costs.

BUT.. if I had to pay for elect/cooling this quickly makes less and less sense to do. My state's elect cost
at home is higher on average, it is pretty darn hot out right now so cooling would be nonstop, and watching
over these 3 boxes takes more effort then 40+ freebsd servers (go figure).

So to get back on topic of my first paragraph.. the people who made large investments and have large bills
to pay must be crapping their pants. The ROI just keeps getting further and further away and difficulty will
not fall that much in my opinion. So what you make back in more BTC will probably be eroded by a falling
price for the rest of the year (my opinion).

Nice conclusion.

+1

Good!  During the summer, I'm only profitable starting at $7/coin with the current difficulty.  I need some difficulty droppage here!

My bad, I assumed they actually monitored all the major pools and estimated from there. Turns out they are just estimating from the number of blocks found. Which is then badly affected by changes in difficulty.

Same here, I figured it wasn't going to be profitable to invest in new hardware as I expected it would likely slide to 8~10 before 3 months' up.

Unfortunately I know some people who invested in tens of new cards just in the past month.

Yea thats just insanity.

Many people who may have spent between $1-3k on equipment are not "poor" and thus aren't going to freak out just because the investment hasn't paid off quickly. Those who will freak out are young, poor people who bought more than they could afford on credit cards and have no income from jobs etc.  Who knows what percentage of miners fall into that category? Maybe a lot, maybe very few?

But it's not like many people spent tens of thousands of dollars on mining hardware. These are generally not "big scary investments."

whenever the difficulty changes, the total hashrate skyrockets because of how it's calculated. this same thing happens every time. you have to wait 24-36 hour for that total hasrate calculation to get back to normal. It's not people buying rigs the day difficulty changes, or getting rid of them 2 days after a difficulty change, its just that the calculation is too basic to calculate the total hashrates when there are 2 different difficulties worth of solved blocks.

I like http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ (http://bitcoin.sipa.be/) better; the growth rate just dropped below 0% today.

goddamn it, i wanted to invest in corn beef, too  :-\

Excellent.

Look here: http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php
You get to see over which blocks the 'instant' calculation of hashrate was done. Right now for blocks 139509-139629 block rate is 90% of difficulty, which is more than you can account to mere luck or variability.

Right. If you consider the cost of power, air conditioning, floor space, and labor, it's far worse. Most of the
people mining are probably losing money if they amortize all their costs.

35 minutes since last block now. MINE/SELL/BUY/HOLD/WAIT!

I took track of the total hashrate change for quite sometime,  the current hashrate is about 1-1.5Thash/s lower when compared to the same time in the last 10-days period.(about 3.6 Thash/s lower than the number immediately after the most recent difficulty change), and combined with the fact that difficulty growth has also slowed down, I think my original conclusion makes sense.

Further drop of 0.3 Thash/s since last time I checked.

yeah, sorry about that, my internet connection went down for a bit...  ;)









just kidding! lol

I hesitate to mention the obvious.... 1)  Most miners live in the northern hemisphere. 2) That summer is HOT!

Thus it makes less sense to mine in the summer... mining has a double cost, power and heat.

However in winter heat is practically free for electrically-heated homes.  Would your rather burn $$ through a resistor (electric heater) or produce the SAME heat AND get a few BitCoins?   Duh!!

Really?

/Europe

Consider this also:

24 hr lucK from the stats:
deepbit: -17.8%
btcguid: -44.5%
slush: you can calculate yourself but two rounds over 5 hours.

If you have invested in a serious amount of hardware then the game has just changed slightly.

Back in May/June/July my mining was making good money with almost 0 work on my part, now to stay ahead I have to trade or "manage my investment", But overall my ROI is exactly what it was back when prices were sky high, you don't exactly have to be Einstein to know that the only certainty here is that the market can and will move in both directions.

Some people see an investment in anything as gaining a "treasure" and the second prices start moving they PANIC. They just never bothered to check exactly what it was they were getting into.

If prices start adjusting again in a upward direction (I think it will but I'm also 100% certain there will be a few bumps along the way) then the dweebs switching off their miners now will loose what they could have gained back over a fairly short period of time.

Ok so prices don't go back up but playing even a 0.20 dollar variance in price during the course of a day (in either direction) can make a heck of a difference to your bottom line and the lower we go the likelier of more percentile volatility.  ;D

I was just going to say this. Luck appears to actually have been on our side. Maybe there really has been a large reduction in the size of the network in the past few days???

deepbit uses a negative percentage value to show good luck. btcguild does the opposite.

I already converted that for you at the time when I wrote the post (from +17.8% to -17.8%). Of course, 24 hr turned around and deepbit is lucky now

Details :p

Can't people go read the description in the pool websites and figure the number out themselves?

Luck considerably slowed down the network hashing rate (as shown in the luck numbers I posted earlier. And if you can't figure them out. I can't help.) Now deepbit is lucky (from unluck 17% to luck 17%, hopefully now you can understand!), and the instant difficulty is going back up http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

to be honest, i got in at the start of july and i bought 4 cards (2 6870s and 2 5830s) and ive already made all the initial startup capital back and then some.

but i only buy wahts on sale. i got the 6870s for ~130 each after selling the games that game with them and the rebates.

based on mh/s, difficulty, price of btc, gut feeling on how i have been doing, i do not feel that your comment
is valid. Unless you just mean the price of your video cards and forgetting all about the MB, PSU, RAM, CPU,
etc... to make them function. A MB that has 4 pcie slots is not exactly cheap and if it contains 1x slots you
now need extenders at approx 8-12 a pop...

are you also factoring in the cost of elect and cooling?

just curious is all. getting a ROI in less then a month or about 1 month just does not add up to me.

My socket 775 P35DS3L has 4 pcie slots, as do many other budget motherboards.  It was available for around $80 when I bought it in 2008.  The E2180 CPU isn't worth much now but cost me $67 in 2008.  PCIe extenders can be bought for $3/each if you can wait 2 weeks or $12/ea if you need them fast.  PSUs sufficient for 3 cards are available under $90 constantly.  'Case' can be scrap lumber.

It's still possible to build efficiently even today if like the poster above you recycle buy GPU on sale/rebated and don't just fill a newegg cart with the latest hotness.  I believe far more people chose the expensive path, however.  And on high interest credit cards.  There are many sweating blood, no doubt about it.

As far as a hash drop:  you wish.  Deepbit is still adding about 100 Mhash/day and that figure is a bit more accurate since it's not computed from rate of solved blocks.

Hardware is not for sale yet because it's still profitable to mine.  When it gets sold it'll be on ebay and craigslist, and initially not at fire sale prices.  ATM I would not pay more than $70 for a 5830 I knew was used for mining for the last 2-3 months, would you?

I would pay $110 if I was looking to add more cards and the previous owner still had the purchase papers and hadn't registered it for warranty.

If you're actively following the market and doing what you can to take advantage of EVERY little swing of it then a ROI on mining equipment is still very possible. However this is obviously not for everyone.

Atm building a cased rig from scratch that will do 1.4-1.6 G#/s (depending on how successful you are in clocking) can be done here in China for around 1150USD US prices should be very similar using AMD Athlon 455 cpu, 4gb kingston 1333 ram, Msi 890FXA mobo, tagan 1300W PSU, 6x 95cfr avc fans, all in an IN WIN Dragon Rider case with 4x saphire 5850 extreme.

The ROI on something like this should be 4-5months based on current difficulty and prices. Then again factor in a tiny bit of trading and you can easily cut at least 2 months off that.  ;D

Another way to interpret that is "I wouldn't even buy it if I could find 5830s for $110 new right now."  Which doesn't conflict with my valuing severely used, non-warrantied cards at $70 or lower.

Eh.... fair enough.  :P

So you are factoring in a 175% return from 2-3 months of trading?  At first you will have 0 btc to trade, at the end 100%, so you're effectively looking at quadrupling your BTC stash over two months using on average 50% of your total BTC.

I won't question you massively outperforming everyone "with a tiny bit of trading", but if you are banking on such an amazing trading record why not skip building completely and invest the $1250 into BTC?  You'd be looking at far more BTC at the end of two months than that 4x5830 rig will ever mine because of compounding.  Even buying the rig at the end of 2 months instead of uprfront will still leave you with a 50% higher return.

How much does electricity cost in China at the moment? Since we don't actually earn anything in local dollars until we convert it, that's the currency conversion costs. At the same, while USD to RMB is pegged, it might shift further if USD continues to slide. So there's the risk of losing a few more percentage in that few months before cashing out.
 
Would be interesting to see how you arrived at the 4~5 months ROI figure. :D

Has anyone experimented with solar-powered mining yet?

My wife would never allow me to stick money directly into BTC plus that doing if from here is COMPLICATED (for outgoing international wires) and EXPENSIVE AS HELL on 1250USD wire I'd loose at least 100USD in fees and it'd take hours of time in the actual bank. However building a rig is building a rig and I think of it as at least half the fun plus if the prices drop to 0 you still have the hardware value (ok I know most peeps don't want 20 PCs but still).

As to trading my current average is somewhere between +0.8-1% a day averaged out over the last three months in terms of net fiat. Occasionally I can seriously out do that by adding a bit of forex into the equation as I still have accounts back home (UK and Denmark). With the options Ruxum are offering up, the ability of do serious forex leveraging are going to become INCREDIBLE especially since a lot of them are within one exchange.

As to my ROI calculation on that rig I use the following formula I consider it fairly conservative particularly in view of the recent hashrate drop and using a lowish price in view of recent history. And YUP I was overly optimistic in my previous post I forgot to factor in that you get a new starting point every few days, I built three of these month ago and the numbers were "good" then.

NOTE POWER NOT FACTORED IN AS I BELIEVE THE OTHER FIGURES TO BE VERY CONSERVATIVE AND THE SYSTEM ISN'T EXPANDED DURING THE PERIOD WHICH WOULD ALTER THE EQUATION GREATLY. FURTHERMORE I'M SUPPOSING THAT PEOPLE WILL KEEP ADDING # AT A STABLE RATE.

http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php

1500 M#/s price 11USD (not too far off I believe)

11 days @ present  dif     = 96.69$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 88.95$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 81.84$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 75.29$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 69.27$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 63.72$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 58.63$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 53.94$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 49.62$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 45.65$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 42.00$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 38.64$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 35.54$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 32.71$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 30.09$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 27.68$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 25.47$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 23.43$
11 days @ prev dif x 1.08= 21.56$

So 209 days in you'll have a return of roughly 960.72 USD PROVIDED THAT

A) You can't clock super hard. Going up to 1600M#/s should put you @ 1045 USD

B) Difficulty increases don't slow down. A drop to a 4% average increase would put you @ 1304.25 USD

C) Prices remain at this low level. An increase to 12 would put you @ 1048.13 USD

D) You don't add a card after 2 weeks (and yes they will all fit in the case even 6 and stay cool using extenders this is a massive full tower). Adding a card would put you @ 1154 USD minus 150USD for the extra card.

This is how I calculate if it's worth the risk. These are just a small number of factors that may positively affect the outcome of your investment if you start combining these factors to lesser degrees it's fairly clear that an ROI of 5-6 months is possible.

I couldn't bother to read the whole thread. Did anyone told OP that he is a clueless newb ?  Total hashrate didn't fall, network is still at 14 Th. What he and people like him are watching is wrong data on bitcoincharts.com. They are showing how lucky the network is at solving the blocks.

I hope you don't really think that network fall from 14 Th down to 11 Th or whatever it was due to miners leaving. When network is lucky bitcoincharts.com will show 16 Th when variance is not on our side it will show 12 Th.

+1. So are some people here who can't read or figure out some simple math.

It isn't luck, if you look at that site, the instant hashrate is now calculated over completely different blocks than yesterday, 139689-139809, and it is still at 94% of difficulty.

http://blockexplorer.com/q/estimate

1889033.33366549

With 1311 blocks left.  I don't think the total hash rate dropped off too much, but it's completely leveled off for sure.

Cheers,
Kermee

That is based on the recent 120 blocks, which IS still luck related (for 20 hrs). I'd trust more on the blockexplorer estimate.

It depends on how significant is power costs in your area that's why. In my area, operating costs is between 60~80% of BTC value depending which way things move. So for me, it's not worthwhile to invest in new hardware.

As your number show, the returns are dwindling, and if prices go up, difficulty will increase faster as it becomes more profitable, causing people to jump in. So I don't think there's actually enough buffer to completely discount power unless you are getting really cheap power.

It has been like this for many days, I have recorded long term trend (after removing the fluctuations of course)for that. We can wait to see if the high hashrate you predict will reappear in a reasonable timeframe.

Total hashrate is stable or if you want it your way it dropped from exactly 14.00 Th down to 13.80 Th, reason is a big price move lower from $14.00 area down to $10.00.

What I was referring in my previous post was that your title and your info is super misleading, reason you were most likely watching the numbers on bitcoincharts.com where they have a wrong formula to calculate total network hashrate. This has been discussed already in the past in other threads.

I do agree that we are dropping for the last few days but so far nothing major if you consider huge price move and the fact that it's summer in the northern hemisphere. Next difficulty will most likely stay within -+3%

So, it looks like we're getting ever closer to the average US cost of production break even point.