Bitcoin Forum

+20.86% You gotta know when to pull the plug....

Turned off my miners this morning...until BTC goes back over $550. Need the fiat.

More bad news:
Estimated Next Difficulty:   28,023,615,809 (+17.53%) in 14 days.

According to the site below, ~29.4 PH was added to true network over the last 12 days.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

29.4 PH is an insane amount of hashrate,  so hopefully some of the increase can be explained by above average luck, which will help with future difficulty increases as luck normalizes.

To put things into perspective, 29.4 PH/s is:
- 6,533 SP30s at 4.5 TH/s
- 66,667 S3s at 441 GH/s
- 29,400 S2s at 1 TH/s

Speculation points to Bitfury deploying massive private mining farms to explain most of the increase, but the scale we're talking about here is absurd. At 1W/GH, you'd need access to a 29.4 megawatts of power for such an increase.

I have heard, no way to confirm though, is that the modus operandi of Chinese miner equipment manufacturers (maybe all) are to use their new machines THEMSELVES for 2 months and then sell them off. Would be a logical thing for them to do but if true, they are the only ones going to make money for sure!

There is a way to confirm.  The very first ASIC company (Avalon) did just that.  Here's proof:
http://www.coindesk.com/avalon-accused-of-mining-with-customer-asics/ (http://www.coindesk.com/avalon-accused-of-mining-with-customer-asics/)

They configured the miner to mine to an address and didn't bother to clear it before shipping.  Customers can see how much Avalon mined just to that one address.

Right now what most manufacturers, not just the Chinese ones, are doing is they are taking customer profits and building their own farms to compete with customers.  For every miner you buy they buy 2-5 miners at no cost to them other than space and electricity.

yes its the called burn out test...however this adds that they have also low RMA

Hahaha...you are right...I have been somewhat impressed how reliable my array of machines (Antminer, A2, Dragon Miner, SP10) has been! Now I know why. If the run for 2 months at the factory making those dudes money then they will run for years (which of course they won't anyway).

Two days later and the prediction is going up ( 18.45% )

The war of the data centres is in full swing.

I did the same, after only having my S3's for a week, that last difficulty increase took a huge chunk out of my profitability so I listed and sold them on eBay.

I pretty much broke even on the deal and I feel good about that.

Yep, I've been debating when would be the time that mining is no longer worth it and for me I believe today is it. I can make more day trading and just simply buying btc than mining.

when this thing stop? i mean it can not go up forever, it seems just a battle who control more hash now, distigusting

It will never stop!

i went to solo mining now.--

Probably somewhere in the 80B mark it has to top out.

of course it stops growing  if .5 watts is the best an asic  chip does  and 4 cents a kwatt is the cheapest big power supply diff will slow or btc will jump quite a bit.

Spec threads are fun.  I am pretty bullish about it all and most guy are bears here on bitcointalk spec threads.

I see growth under 20 closer to 15    maybe even 13 this time.

I also do not see huge network growth predicted.  here is why.  most mining is in the hands of asic builders .

 the small guy with 1k to 20k in household gear  has less then 20% of the network.  I used to sell amazing amounts on ebay  not anymore. .

 The guy that is doing this with a few paychecks worth of money is spent/tapped/tired of the game.

I still see btc price growth with less diff growth.    we averaged 24% for 200 days   then 18% for 200 days and since june 29th the diff has been  9% this is for 55 days.

  I can't see more then 10% for the next 145 days.  Not at 550 or 500 usd a coin.    So either diff lowers or price jumps.

You said it was going to be 11% last jump and it was over 20% like I said.  You're guessing 13-15 this jump, I say 20-25 since it's already on track for a 23% jump.

Maybe people are underestimating the winter miners down south.  Vegemite miners... I'm looking at you Organ Of Corti

But our winter is all but over.

0.23 exahash/sec! Will it pass 1.0 by the end of the year?

Difficulty will go to the moon!

"To the Moon I say" with old stodgy British accent

No, not to the moon, but certainly to the upper troposphere where its slightly cooler.

I think the rumours that there will be major rollouts of data centres between now and XMAS appears to be coming true. If that is the case, then its 400PH to 700PH by XMAS as they predict.

26.5B on the nose is my punt for the next leap.

Didn't know you were down there too.  Tilt the planet back this way, it's been hot as hell here in CA and I have a feeling our "winter" is going to be hotter than everybody else's summer.  My new S3s don't like it.

Seeing as how I don't have OoC's weekly pool stats yet I'm going to guess a good 30 billion.  I think the network has been having bad luck looking at Ghash.   I can't tell from DF's stats and they passed ghash in power.

Well it's certainly been a lot quieter around here the last few months thanks to winter but mining is no less doomed here even at cold temperatures.

Well I was wrong but I do not see the asic builders reasons for adding huge asic power.

 if they can build .8 watt per hash  machines they no longer need us.  all they need to do is sit in a room and add hashpower very slowly.  

it is in their best interest to limit growth under 10%  and mine more then sell.

Holy cow, the garbage spilled from your mouth.


Spend your btc for better education will ya?

One man's trash is another man's treasure.

Frankly I no  longer can see why asic manufacturers would want to sell gear.

When building and mining makes a profit not selling them to miners seems like a  smart option to me.

But what do I know.

Just don't worry.

Keep mining.

One difficulty adjustment isn't gonna kill anybody. In case you haven't noticed, difficulty adjustments happen on a regular basis.

What's so different about 20% this time and these??

Nov 05 2013    510,929,738    30.70%    3,657,378 GH/s
Oct 26 2013    390,928,788    46.02%    2,798,377 GH/s
Oct 16 2013    267,731,249    41.45%    1,916,495 GH/s

Those were MUCH worse, yet people are still mining.

If one difficulty adjustment ruins your ROI, you're doing something wrong.

I agree some I'm not happy with 20 but it could be worse.  I am lucky to have cheap electricity and space.  I'm in it for the long haul with my asics.  GPU/CPU is dead for me, but asic will be alive hopefully for a while.

Diversify risk: sales are guaranteed return. Mining is uncertain return.  For example, an S3 going into production today might produce 0.76 BTC before flatlining. Selling it for 0.66 BTC and not having to put it into production yourself is a good comparative return.

Difficulty has been on a slow but sure downward trend, and spikes have been around since it started. A simple graph of BCW's raw data shows pretty much everything you need.

http://www.megamine.com/assets/megamine/img/hashrate-Aug-19.png

On a 5th polynomial trend line (the blue dahsed line) it's still downwards, and that's hardly surprising as the last 4 changes have averaged at 9.33% compared to the previous 4 before that at 17.5%, the previous 4 to that at 15.39%

Even if the next one is 15% then the 8 week comparison goes to 12.3% verses 13.74% verses 14.4%.

So on 8 weeks cycles we are still far better off than we have been for many many months now, and in %age terms, far better off from the September 13 to Dec-13 when the 8 week averages were 25/Sept:30.8%, Nov5:36.4%, 21Dec:23.4%.

But then it depends if you are looking at this long term, or 'quick buck'.

J

pretty much my conclusion that diff % will trend down not up.

and at this moment :

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

says 23,844 to 27, 456  which is 15.15%

and http://bitcoincharts.com/

has  23,844 to 25, 198 or 5.67%

These are more in line with my guess for next diff  still more then 4 or 5 days out. So who really knows.

That difference between BCW and BCC is just different views on how they calculate the next change based on history.

Currently the network is solving 6 blocks in 55.3 minutes, so 8.5% quicker than it should, and the block solve rate has dropped significantly over the last few days (the grey line is under the blue line https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty).

Somewhere around 10% is therefore highly likely and 13.5% is the current trend line (dotted blue in my graph) so anything under 13.5% will continue the downward trend.

Again, 10-15% is good compared to what we were dealing with late 13 / early 14. It's far more stable and predictable now.

J
www.megamine.com

I turned my miners back on recently.  I'm losing money on every bitcoin created, but it's nothing compared to the profits made in 2013.  The higher the hash rate the stronger the network.  Plus pumping it higher encourages miners not to sell in hopes of getting a better price tomorrow.

About a month ago difficulty drove me to a fork in the road, I sold off about 80% of my SHA256 miners and moved to scrypt and altcoins for mining. Since then, my profits are back up to the late 2013 / early 2014 era of mining. While the future of the altcoin market is hotly debated (especially since nearly everyone trades it in for bitcoin anyway), I am nonetheless back to making money mining.

As the difficulty continues to rise, I'm more inclined to dump the remaining 20% of my bitcoin-concentrated miners.

Had someone say they were going to invest $ 50k on mining because he thought mining difficulty would increase at a rate of 10% max... Hope he didn't invest hah.

This makes sense in way. The problem is in whose interest is it for a person with a miner to not use it in order to keep the hash rate down?  Every miner except the one idling a valuable asset.

None of the big players are going to slow down their deployment of their existing investments to reduce difficulty increases. The investment depreciates too rapidly. The question I have is will the changing difficulty picture make new investment in next generation mining rigs infeasible? Are they willing to gamble on increasing BTC value?   

yeah If aisc's flatten out at .4 or  .5 watts    the incentive to build them after a lot of research and development costs is not really there.

Heck I could argue in an empty cold country like Greenland, Canada, Russia building a cheaper power plant makes more sense then building a better chip.

If you can make a 2 cent a kwatt power plant/Data Center combo  for 1 cent a kwatt  over 5 years…..  

your power price for the next 5 years is 3 cents a kwatt.   That plant would be really valuable for miners   it may be easier  to build cheap  20-50 mega watt Data Centers instead of building

.1watt chips.

The next king of mining maybe the super DC/hosting service.  They only do the hosting and at the right price safely.

 Lee from this thread   is making a move at a super center

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=514758.0

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=514758.msg8548073#msg8548073


but he has had a lot of issues getting it on line.

this type of mining may be what we get to do.  I would hope he can get it to work well.

I believe the difficulty would increase by at least 20% moving forward, too many manufacturer .

Difficulty has been slowing down, but the percentage of your electricity bill compared to your mining earnings has increased a lot.
Back to the old days with GPU, where after the electricity fee there is only a small amount profit left.
But this time it is different, risks have become greater than in the GPU days.
If BTC stay to long at a lower level and you don't have power less than 10 cents, you can get into financial trouble quickly if you depend on mine and sell BTC to cover your electricity bill.

no not enough  cheap power plants in the world for constant 20%  growth.

barring a new magic .05 watt chip.

20 % for 24 months  that can't happen . do the math  


oh current predications

 https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Bitcoin Difficulty:   23,844,670,039

Estimated Next Difficulty:   27,061,375,299 (+13.49%)

Adjust time:   After 785 Blocks, About 5.0 days

http://bitcoincharts.com/

Difficulty   23844670039

Estimated   25580501467 in 785 blks

7.2%


So as of right now   7.2% to 13.49 %

These numbers are more in line with my thoughts on diff.

For asic builders keeping network growth between 5% - 10% is in their best interests.

I love the talk of "it's going to continue at >20%".

https://scontent-b-ams.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xpf1/v/t1.0-9/10400867_736122266461378_5571943303229371925_n.png?oh=0ff88711d755da4de6c81767bc69e0ad&oe=5474C3D8

Red is a rolling 4 difficulty change average (~8 weeks), blue a rolling 8 difficulty changes (~16 weeks)

It's relatively easy to calculate on a constant BTC:$ rate where the whole network becomes unprofitable even using 20nm kit. [hint, it's not that far off].
It's also relatively easy to work out that eventually the electricity bill becomes greater than the market cap of Bitcoin. [hint, it's not that much longer]

Those two things show that either.

a) Miners will just lose money
b) BTC:$ has to change
c) Difficulty changes have to slow down even further than they already have been for the last 12 changes (24 weeks).

Of course the 'trick' is to know which, or all, of those are going to happen ;)

J

Exactly why does the small difference in price matter so much? Are you instantly selling your coins? Then this wouldn't come as a surprise to me.
Why not keep mining all the time and sell it later if you have to?
I remember the days that I got into this business, the difficulty was 7M (!) or even less. It was quite some time ago.
If I only had a 4 TH/s ASIC then.  >:( :D

Only 4 out of the last 17 difficulty adjustments have been over 20%.

Yes, but 2 of those 4 were in the last 5 adjustments.  Clearly there is an upsurge in the network growth rate.  It will go up, level off growth rate, and then go up again.  Depends on whether companies feel like deploying massive MW farms. Nothing home miners can do at this point.

Many miners sell BTC to pay their electric bill and/or to purchase new mining gear. So of course a significant portion of earnings are immediately sold.

Nothing like a bit of "statistics" to throw in the mix.

You seem to miss saying that the average of those last 5 is 12.45% but the previous 5 it was 14.07%.

14.07% is greater than 12.45% no matter how you look at it, and unless you are trying to 'spot mine' for a two week period then it's the average that sets you total earnings, not the individual changes.

J
www.megamine.com

You're comparing base increases in the difficulty without the effect of luck.  Total network luck is not statistically available but quite of bit of info can be gleaned from OoC's weekly pool stats.  The last set of 5 adjustments had bad luck, probably explaining why this last jump was over 20% (since the previous 2 jumps to that had very bad luck).  The luck in May and June was slightly positive I believe.

So 12.45 may very well be more than 14.07 when weighted.  You could compare the Bitcoins/GH/s as a comparison rather than the difficulty.

You can reasonably estimate luck as you have a large sample size, and certainly just using confidence interval analysis to remove any identifiable upward trend of true added hash rate is relatively straightforward.

On using CI's, of course luck variance can easily be +/-5% and there is of course nothing to say you can't have +/-100% (there is nothing that says miners couldn't solve every block in a two week period with the first calculation).

But, a bit like the lottery, your confidence interval of a taking the 4 week average of every block is around 2% for the 95% interval, and as it would follow the same distribution that gives you around -2->0->+2 extreme.

8 weeks would bring to above 1%, 12 weeks to just less than 1%.

The drop below 20% for the last 12 weeks is therefore within C99% and probably C99.5%.

Not impossible that luck hasn't done that, but if you believe that you should probably just buy lottery tickets rather than mining....

Or of course, you could pop over to Megamine where our 95% luck guarantee means you don't have to worry about it ;)

J
www.megamine.com

That is always good, but again you have 'luck' in there as the network GH/s is not an actual figure, it's just 1/[time taken to solve a block*diff] which is entirely dependent on luck.

That's the problem with difficulty, it doesn't tell you what is 'actually' out there, it tells you what the network 'thinks' is out there.

You can also skip the /GHs and look at either

https://blockchain.info/charts/miners-revenue?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=
Yep it's "flat". Tells you a lot.

Or this one (number of new coins)
https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

If you 7/14 day average that you'll find it's also surprisingly flat.

J
www.megamine.com

I think OoC calculation of BTC/GH/s was based off of pool's statistics that reported how many shares had been submitted and how many bitcoins (block solves) were rewarded.  So it wouldn't be based off of luck (reverse miner speed calculation) but actual miner share submissions.  Unfortunately this isn't available for 1/3 of the network since solo miners and some pools don't report this info.

So if the we assume the 1/3 that is not reported is the same as that which is reported, then if the BTC/GH/s goes down 50%, we assume the network speed has network speed had doubled (irrespective of what might have happened with the actual difficulty).

Concur. You're only factor there is stale/people hanging back, but minor in the grand scheme of things.

 well once you attempt to factor   btc price as part of the calc   it does become a more complicated model.

numbers as of  9 am eastern standard time

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty


Bitcoin Difficulty:   23,844,670,039

Estimated Next Difficulty:   27,142,574,550 (+13.83%)

Adjust time:   After 447 Blocks, About 2.8 days


http://www.bitcoincharts.com/

Difficulty   23844670039

Estimated   26599084298 in 446 blks

about 11.55 %

Please try to remember some other reasons for diff shifting a bit.

Cooler weather is coming .  So many people are buying and running more gear with that in mind.

Bitfury did open a big plant.



I still see no real incentive for the top builders of asic's to sell to us.

 Mining at 1 watt a gh , 10 cents a kwatt and 500 usd a coin  turns a profit .

Up to a diff of 80000 they are all good.  Why sell much gear just mine

  At a diff   60746 M         a 1000 gh 1 watt   per hash 10 cents a kwatt machine earns a $1.40 a day .

Any builder with that cost for power no longer has much incentive to sell gear.



And many builders have .8 watt at 6 cents a kwatt  they would be earning $3.03 a day at   a diff of 60746M

and 9.44 usd a day now

This maybe is one of the biggest problems right now, the big mines adding more and more MW, they must pay there electric bill also, selling more and more BTC for all the bills and a real profit, adding more MW next, and and...

Difficulty goes up, exchange rate goes down, in a few month the big mines like BF, cex, peta and some china mines will have the control over the most mined BTC's and the network.

This can be like a horror movie. The greed of the MW mines promises a dark future for Bitcoin - the worst scenario is a big, big crash... Just my two cents.

Good news for the price though and even the Chinese miners are going to want to keep the price up.

Hopefully the exchange rate know that also.  ;)