Bitcoin Forum

Where did it come from? Sp30s?

Normal network variance swings.  Sure, there is always some new hardware being added, but think about what you're saying.  4000+ SP30s added in the past few days?

Was just guessing, wasn't sure if it was the premine some companies do before release or test mining or whatever. This is actually a pretty high amount of PH compared to the last couple weeks.

may be variance flux.  have to watch it. if it drops to  5ph it was variance.

See the thread here (which was just 2 threads under yours)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=724865.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=724865.0)

It can easily be attributed to variance unless some other information is shown.

As far as I know there are only 1k SP30 units in the August batch so it can't be them. I say it's variance + a mix of SP-Tech and bitmain hardware being deployed.

Where do you get such information? they might have like 10k units under testing...

Their capacity production and resources are limited. You can't just build 10k units out of thin air and you need more than 10M-20M$ upfront money.

This increase is from Bitfury's DC in Iceland.

yes and they pay 3 to 4 cents a kwatt underclock and undervolt their chips.  so even though the gear is not as power efficient as the sp30.

  the low power price allows them to run at a profit.  for the sake of argument  they get 1 watt per 1 gh  at 3.5 cents a kwatt   they can make good money.

 lets say 20 ph costs them 10 mill usd to build  lets say it pulls 20,000 kwatts btc stays stable at 585 usd and diff does 12%  they make a fuck load of money.

 I get 10 mill in  returns 27 mill so that is about 17 mill profit in about 1 year

if you use 15% diff 10 mill in returns  22 mill that is about 12 mill profit in 270 days

even if you use  20% diff  10 mill in returns 16 mill that is about 6 mill profit in 200 days

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1280x1024q90/537/iS76UO.png

During this same period, the hashrate distribution for Discus Fish went from 22% to 29% and in the last 24 hours has more hashrate now than ghash.io.

https://blockchain.info/pools?timespan=24hrs

Could be a variance... in the end, only difficulty will matter.

True and that's my concern.. At this rate we'll have a 20% to 25% jump in difficulty.

no  still under 12%

  the network is getting very large.  so 25% jumps are not easy to do.

here look at

 https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty  they read 19,729 to 21,317 or 8.05%

http://bitcoincharts.com/ -----------------> they read 19,729 to 20,666 or 4.72 %

they average to ________________> 19,729 to 20,992 or  6.39 %

The network may be 180 to 195ph the exact number is not sure.

Some of the jumps to drops is variance some is gear.

We are early in the jump/diff for this period but I see us under 12% as the worst.

Yeah this jump looks like it will be larger.  The network had bad luck on the last difficulty according to OoC network analysis - some larger pools up to 15% bad luck.  So if we have good luck this period we might see a good 20 to 25% jump.

Is any increasing in speed affects the difficulty so is this profitable again if i invest in mining

Actually, the higher the difficulty the less profit to mine..

20-25% is just too much


From https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Bitcoin           Difficulty:      19,729,645,941

Estimated Next Difficulty:   22,040,551,579 (+11.71%)

Block Generation Time      1 block: 9.1 minutes

From http://bitcoincharts.com


Difficulty   19729645941

Estimated   20913565978 in 1449 blks

Blocks/hour   6.87 / 524 s


the above two sites use different methods to predict.   

 but a real key is the blocks per hour

 6 per hour = 0 growth

or 1 block every 10 minute = 0 growth

we are in a 9-12% area at this moment which is far off from 20-25%

Also remember if you are opening a huge farm like cex.io did  they want to do it on the day after diff jumped.

It seems that was done whatever you see now will not be as bad. 

I really don't see growth to be a big deal like it was.

 just remember gpus used around 300 watts for 1gh and were still able to earn some money as late as spring of 2013

now 2 watt gear sucks.  you really want 1 watt or less. 

with .6 = sp30 and .75 s-3  the kings.        300 to .6 is a 500 to one increase  april 2013 diff  was  10,076,293  current diff is   19,729,645,941

  that is 1900 to one

 price   was about 150-240 in april so say 190 avg price now is 580 so 3 to 1 

 so take the 1900 divide by 3 = and the price weighted diff jump is around 633 to one

 that is in the ball park of the power efficiency and the price increase.

 I do feel new growth can not be much higher then 12-15 %  for the simple reason the big money guys do the same calculations I am doing.

 They then decide that  making a 100ph farm does not pay with current power + price ratios.

For nail biting hourly(ish) updates to the hash rate, be sure to check back here:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-2k.png

Linked from:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

Almost as much fun as watching the S&P 500.

@philipma1957

Your analysis are most of the time very well thought and good, but you forgot miners who can buy in bulk.
Up 50 Th in 1 go get a reasonable discount, but these whales that come into play now, build their own miners.
Which is incredible cheap to do in China.
They shipped them with pallets to their farm with low electricity costs.
The small guys who bought their gear expensive and have high electricity rates are pushed out of the mining game, which will decrease the difficulty a bit in favour of the big whales and the other small miners who have cheap electricity.

At the end these bastards take a big cut from the pie.
Even for miners with a few hundreds Terahash who don't have electricity costs below 10 cents are having tough times.

What are Chinese electrical costs? Don't they import a fair amount of their thermal coal?

The shortterm computed hashrate keeps at ultra high levels so it really looks like we are gonna experience another 20%+ shock...I ve been watching http://currenthashrate.com lately

well can't disagree with you .   You can't mine in Europe unless you can steal power.


what makes things tough to calculate is not cheap miner availability.  lots available.

 cheap power  how much is there of it.

sake of argument sp30 .6 watts is God, Allah, Jesus , King ,Queen , 'Q' (for us trekies) or any other deity Zeus Odin Thor.

 but lots of .8 watt gear lots of it.  

 At .8 watts and 2 or 3 cents a k-watt making money is easy
Heck I have 2 S-3's at 3.5 cents a kwatt but that is my low cost limit.

What is the power limit for an iceland plant?

or for a washington/oregon power plant?

 we know they have cheap power but how much?

that availability number is not know to me…

for all I know cex.io can run 300ph at 2 cents a watt  and the hashing gear is built . along with the power plants.   they just add 20 or 30 ph when they think it is proper.

that bolded thought it what keeps me going.  the best case for the little guy is that above sentence  is true and the 3 or 4 biggest companies are doing just that.  If so they

want this to last and will not fuck it up.  only time will tell.  

Besides mining is more fun then looking up a btc address and a coinbase price.

No. It's BitFury.

Aha.  I said Bitfury was quiet lately and I was poopooed.  They have to be doing something instead of just sitting on their aging hardware.

Theres been about 50 TH coming online every couple of minutes, or, with every update at https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty for the last 15 minutes, which puts the network hashrate at 180 PH.

http://www.coinwarz.com/network-hashrate-charts/bitcoin-network-hashrate-chart puts it at about 215 PH at the moment.

If this keeps up then its looking like it might head to about at least a 30% difficulty rise for the next jump.

While a sudden 20ph spike is likely variance, the constant increase is just sick. People are really going mad for mining hardwaré.

It's not variance if it's a sustained increase and it's going even higher, so it looks like indeed somewhere between 30 and 60PH/s has been added to the network.

No one is sitting on 100s of PHs of mining equipment and waiting to deploy them, lol. They push them out onto the network as fast as they can build them.

And they're not waiting before the next difficulty adjustment to do so. That makes absolutely no sense. That's exactly the same as a home miner with 2 new S3s. "Hmm, I think I'll wait 6 days before running my new S3s. I don't want to add to the difficulty until the next adjustment." That just doesn't happen.

###

That is like saying: Hey we can print money, but lets wait until we can print less of it.

Sucks for all the KNC Miners :( how you gonna ROI now

Do you KNOW it's BitFury or speculating?

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/08/01/bitfury-asic-maker-builds-20mw-bitcoin-mining-data-center/

http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/30/bitfury-announces-hosted-mining-services/

Thanks, I'd say that's sufficiently convincing.

I think it is always so funny, when right before a new type of chip is about to be launched (two weeksTM) the hashrate spikes ;)

Except this spike seems to be coming from a year old 55nm chip. Go figure! Lol.

As much as I dislike BFL, I think they have very little (if anything) to do with the network hashrate rising. They've been relegated to being a washed-up has-been.

  if the network has 160ph and you have 300ph sitting in gear you would be a moron to drop the 300 ph into the network.
you do not need to bring on more then 20-35 percent in 1 diff jump. If you are going to be the miner. If you want to sell it that is a different story.

1)you would be competing against yourself.
2)you would also need to build a monster power plant more costly then building the gear.
3) you would also need to cool the gear

My point was building the gear  lets say 300ph may be far easier then deploying the gear. Making it may cost a lot less then we realize.

Big companies have larger scale capabilities then any of us realize.

Bitmain tech has sold more then 14,000 s-3's in a month.

Don't think they can't have made an order of 100,000 and sold it to a group.

 Well it is certain  someone has a very big center being put on line.

 

That is false.  If the network is 160PH and you have 300PH the only reason to not put it online is fear of a 51% attack.  The only person who ever really competed with himself unnecessarily was Satoshi.  The math has been done multiple times over by both Meni and I think OoC did it once.  It never makes sense to withhold hashing power - NEVER!

I know.

And what about huge increase in Discus Fish system share https://blockchain.info/pools ? Maybe they are Bitfury clients?

There's been a pretty large percentage increase over the past couple of days in ghash.io as well. I know BitFury does some of their mining in that pool.

You are always competing with yourself, whether you add 300 PH/s or 1 GH/s to the network.  That is something that won't change if you add the hash power at a slower rate.  There is no advantage to adding it slower from what I can see.

Something doesn't add up.

You claim to know about their chips. You claim to know about their datacenters. You claim that they brought up 20MW in Iceland. However, almost 40PH/s just hit the network.

So, the question that all of your customers want answered: Are they using your chips or not? Otherwise how do you explain 40PH/s?

well at the scale of 160ph + 300ph  = 460ph

adding 300 ph at 1 watt per hash is quite a task.   1th = 1k-watt  1 ph = 1m-watt

 300 ph = 300 megawatt

 building the 300 ph in mining gear is not that costly.

having the cooling and the power is harder.

at a certain point large scale mining gear production can be very low cost,

 but to run the mining gear you need access to cheap power.  

 the Niagara Falls power plant usa + can  could run  5,000 m watts

that means a plant is build able  but how many areas have the right setup to make a 300 m watt plant

the idea that I can make gear cheaply.  then add it on as I access power cheaply is not far fetched as some think.

here is a link to Niagara falls power cap.

http://www.niagarafrontier.com/power.html  2700 mw USA + 2300 mw CAN = 5000mw

 enough to run 30x the current network if we burn 1 watt per gh

or 15x the current network if we burn 2 watts per gh

 If bitfury and bitmaintech get access to 2 cent a kwatt for power in large amounts they will build big places.

Not complicated it will happen. 

This article thinks the Republic of Georgia has about 2.3 GW of exploitable hydropower. Not inexpensive to bring on line:

http://www.hydroworld.com/articles/print/volume-21/issue-01/articles/russia---central-asia/georgian-hydropower-turns-river.html

BPA tariff to a public utility district (mostly in Washington state) is less than 0.04/KWH before transmission and other markups. A lot of those dams were build in 30s-60s and so capital cost is largely amortized already.

At 0.02/KWH, 16% bumps every 12 days one Watt/GHS units go negative on power in 5/18/2015. .85 Watt/GHS units go negative 5/30/2015. .5 Watts/GHS units go negative 7/17/2015.

Something is going to change.

Another future perspective @ .85 WATT/GHS form goes online at the 11/7/2014 bump date. Same assumptions ($600, 16%, 12 days).
Difficulty is 64681965063

The plant goes negative on power alone by 5/18/2015 after producing $290 worth of BTC per tera-hash.

Consider the ASIC team planning the .5W/GHS chips. Assume those farms can go online in time for 3/31/2015 bump. Difficulty is 383953893734.

That plant will go negative on power in 108 days after producing $24.50 per terahash of bitcoin (7/5/2015)

Something is going to change.

yes and this brings about my point of building the gear  already and releasing it into the network slowly.

  If you build 300ph for  cheap.  say 30 million and the power plant will be 90 million to build. 

 you can add the hash slower not in a big dump.  Should be interesting to see if  china and russia end up with 2 centers each one with 200-300ph.

Bitmaintech was selling s-1 shipped to the usa as low as 172 usd.  lets say it cost them 100 bucks of which 25 was shipping. so 1 piece was 75 usd.

So if a s-3 = 75 usd to build  21 = 10th  210 = 100th

2100 = 1 ph  so they can build 1 ph for 2100  x 75 =  or 157,500 usd    that is 1,575,000 usd for 10ph  and 15,750,000 usd  for 100 ph


all ball park but not crazy wrong. so making 200 ph may be  doable for 30 million.    remember they could under clock it and use .5 watts  so  making  gear and storing it is

not as crazy as it seems.   the gear alone  is just one part of the data center.    if you build an s-3 center for 21000 units it is 10 ph

 so a 30 ph center is 63,000 units 

They're not using SP-Tech chips.  The bitfury group has their own desing which also happens to be the best 55nm chip to have ever hit the market.  In fact it competes on the same level as other manufacturers 28nm.

So to put it succintly.  The Bitfury group, who opened up the 20MW/40PH farm is using their own hardware with their own (and VC) money.

It looks like longterm only the chip producers themselves will be able to mine profitably. Hopefully none of them gets an extreme advantage in technology, otherwise centralisation is inevitable.

so you think they are getting .5 watts a hash?

20 mw for 40 ph comes to .5 watts   a gh .  I am thinking that chip can do under 1 watt say .9 not .5 watts

the 40 ph may be a bit less say 20-25ph bitfury and  some sp30's alog with some s-3's and a bit of good luck

still may top us over 20% .  I wonder if we get 3 under 10% after this big jump

Do we know of any .5 WATT/GHS setup?

no confirmed tested gear for the little guy does .5 watts

the sp30 is .6 watts not sure if dogie has done his review on it.

No way is BitFury getting 0.5W per GH/s on that 55nm chip.  I'd say the increase is a combination of hardware from BitFury, Spondoolies-Tech and Bitmain and good old fashioned variance.

We're certainly well within the normal ranges for variance. Looking at the log plots:

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=1&timespan=&scale=1&address=

The previous difficulty period looks like it was a pretty unlucky period (could be statistical variance, could be hardware was offline and is now back online) and we're now seeing things returning to the sort of trajectory that they probably should have been on all along.

I completely agree that we're in the normal range for variance.  However, we also know that at least *some* amount of hardware has come online in the past week - Spondoolies-Tech SP30s are mining (last I heard was there were about 1000 August units - but not entirely sure how accurate that number is, or how many of those are actually currently online).  Supposedly BitFury has fired up the new data center and dropped some hardware in.  Don't forget Bitmain has sent quite a few S3s out.  Anyway, the point I was making is that BitFury isn't getting 0.5W per GH/s, and isn't solely responsible for the increased hash rate.

There is a lot of conjecture here on what Bitfury is doing with their hardware but the truth is... we may never know since they are not releasing their new chip to the public.

The original 55nm chips did under 1w/GH. But they did a respin/redesign on the 55nm which had some dead engines in the original chip. And perhaps they were able to improve it by a considerable margin. Now just imagine if they could shrink the die size to 28nm or lower. And they certainly have the money to be able to afford a 14nm chip. They'd leave every competitor in the dust .

The problem they face is when it rolls out and how much it costs to put into production. I ran the numbers on a 0.1 Watt/GHS rig rolling out on 1/1/2015.
@ 0.02KWH, $600/BTC and the current 2014 average of 16% and 12 days per bump, it cash flows on power only for 312 days. A 1 THS rig will produce 1/3 BTC before going negative on power only. Starting difficulty was 1.17116E+11 which is today increasing at 16% every 12 days.

If they wait until 3/1/2015 to go into production with the 1Watt/GHS rig, that same 1 terahash rig will produce 1/6th of a BTC.

I don't see the business case for a major new investment in mining technology. It is a prisoner's dilemma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma type of problem. If everyone stops investment, the value of the existing investment is maximized. If one entity keeps investing, the value of everyone's investment decreases.

In the years to come, I think the economic behavior of the big BTC players over the next 12-18 months will be studied in great detail. It is a mathematically bounded problem where the outcomes only depend on the behavior of the other big players.

What gets turned off will likely get turned back on... heh... I don't think we've seen the last of our 20ph "friend".  ;)  I doubt we will ever know what it was or who it belonged to.

The hashrate seems to be accelerating even more so today as the block solves in the last 24 hours is exceeding 200 now.  Could be luck, could be lots of new eq.  I haven't bothered to look at all the pools to see if it's luck.

Now done to 173 and block time up over 8.5 minutes. Jumpy.

Centralisation is already happening as we speak.

At the current rate, by the end of the year the majority of the hashrate will come from a dozen or more large corporations running multiple data centres around the globe. They will probably go at each other for a period until a few drop off, and the equilibrium will probably be spread across  about 5 or 6 major corporations throughout 2015 - 2016.

Lets just hope that it would not be fully centralized, that would not be a good news for BTC.

 this is wrong...


Why are you wrong  here is why:

as of today the majority of miners are in the hands of less then 10 companies.

In Fact KNC + CEX +BFL + BITMAINTECH +ASICMINER  + SPONDOOLIES = more then 51% of the gear in data centers.  They mine for their selves or rent their hash out.

Home miners with serious fire power no longer exist.

In order to have a big in house setup.   you  need   to rent a warehouse .  what homeowner can give 10k watts in their house for mining alone.

and that comes to 3 sp30's which is a drop in the bucket 13.5th is not much against 200ph

Yes, but the days only thousand or so people GPU mined Bitcoin is long over. Bitcoin is much more popular and much more home miners mining, not even counting huge farms.

Looking at OoC's weekly network pool stats it seems most of the pools had bad luck.  Still we are going to see around a 20% jump tomorrow.  If we get a streak of luck it may go above 20%. Either way since there was bad luck this time it will continue to go up next difficulty as well unless we continue to have bad luck.

Ooh look, a 13K dump just dropped the price to 309  :o

Coinbase is currently at $460. I'm sure glad I slept through that $309 slump!  :o

Whoops I said 12, totally wrong there  ::)