Bitcoin Forum

As the difficulty continues to rise due to popularity of bitcoin, it is becoming more and more unfeasible to purchase new equipment to mine.

In my locale, it will become unfeasible vs. cost of electricity to mine at around 130k difficulty.  That's fast approaching.

How do you others plan to deal with this?

Easy, stop mining. There isn't much those of us who have to pay for our electricity can do. Or does anyone have some bright idea that escaped me?

You can always have others pay for the electricity, without knowing about it :D

Hehehe..yeah I can see this leading to a bunch of miners arrested for electricity theft  :D

Some more intrepid miners may even build their own power generating facilities (ie solar, wind, geothermal, etc)

Time for me to move to Iceland :)

moreover this depends also to the "cost" of BTC. (BTC vs $) ;)

I also would shut down.  There is no reason to keep going and make it harder for others with lower cost electricity.  I will also at the end have a good deal of hardware that I can sell.   I figure if a rig is making 10% of its value in net profit I should keep it going.  If it is a $400 rig and it is making less then $20 net it would be better to sell the rig vs having it depreciate even more.

True.  If at difficulty 150k a bitcoin is worth $1.5 then mining is still profitable.

zoro has a very good point..there are many variables that come into play here, but what matters most in the end is the spread or difference between the cost of mining a bitcoin (as in electricity) and what you can sell it for. If the value of a bitcoin kept on increasing faster than the cost of mining it then technically mining would be perpetually profitable - well up until all 21 million bitcoins are "mined"

This all depends on a continual influx of new bitcoin users driving up the BTC/USD exchange rate. I have a feeling that the system will naturally balance itself so that mining will always be profitable but not necessarily by a wide margin.

In theory, people who have lesser efficiency mining rigs would simply stop mining, which would then decrease difficulty.

There are alot of people who will eventually be sick of seeing less than 1 BTC per day from slush's pool on their nvidia cards and will drop off.

True. So us Radeon 5970 may always have some role to play as the "heavy duty" hashers in the bitcoin network. Now if only I could find me another cheap(r) 5970 :P

Power efficiency will become more important as summer approaches (in the Northern Hemisphere).  I was running my dual card Nvidia GTX 9800 Gx2 during winter just fine, but recently now that the weather is warmer I have noticed my screen start to flicker.  After a little investigation, I discovered that my GPU temperature approached up to 85C, but when I killed the miner, it returned to a much more reasonable level in the 60s.

With a 5870 i moved from 72(winter) to 75 degree (spring) , i''l probably reach 80 degree next june/july. For the profitability, in italy electricity it's expensive, 1 btc cost you around 0.5 usd at actual 82300 difficulty, still profitable.

True. I wonder how temps will be this summer. The central air is broken at my place and the house has poor insulation/lack of it so temps will soar! I may even have to shut down mining on super hot days. See that's another factor we have to take into consideration - the cost of cooling! Running a central air system is definitely going to spike your electricity bill - not to mention the juice already being sucked by the cards.

You might throttle down the video card, underclocking to 600mhz or change the -w parameter (momchil client) from 128 to 16 or 32, the gpu load will decrease and temp so.

Cool. Thanks for the info :)