Bitcoin Forum

So in about seven hours the difficulty will change.  Where do you see it going next?  It is going to be around 156000 today.

My guest.... 170000

My guess.... 222222

You know you can bet on this on http://bitbet.org? Unfortunately that site is down and will be for some weeks as it seems due to hw fail.

Hmm seems I'll have to put off some mining hardware expansion I've been planning. Let's see though if price will go up again :)

The difficulty seems to have been increasing linearly for the last few weeks, so 200 000.

I think the only reason the price is this high is because some experienced investors saw a pretty much virgin market that they could put a decent enough amount of cash into to be able to game it and make a quick profit. Luckily it has held the levels that it got up to and even creeped up a bit further, but there's not nearly the movement in the last week that there was in the previous 2 with some really wild swings.

Yeah, it was crazy there for a couple weeks, and there was a lot of speculation based on that movement that the price would reach $100 and even $1000 by the end of the year, which now seems pretty unreasonable.  If I had to guess, I'd say we'll be lucky to reach $10 by the end of the year.

I'm not watching it as close since I got out of the market, but it looks like it has only gone up about 0.30 BTC in the last week. In the previous 3 weeks it went from sub-$1 to $3.50 .. and has been trying this whole week to get to $4 and doesn't look much like it topped $3.75-3.80.

I thought it would take me 90-100 days to break even on my hardware investment. Since the value shot up my hardware paid for itself in 3 weeks and I even reinvested some to add another card. :) Until 1 broke tonight :(

Ahhh, the joys of being on the right side of a bubble.  :)

Hopefully your card is still under warranty. Be sure to read the manufacturer's fine print if you bought it used. Some times you'll still be covered. If you can contact the original owner and s/he's helpful, you'll have even better luck.

current break even point (at 9 cents per kilowatt-hour) is 11.4 joules per megahash (or 11.4 watts per megahash/s for those who don't fully grok metric).

The difficulty only steps every 2016 blocks, which is about ~2 weeks.

The hashrate looks pretty linear— on an exponential scale: http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-ever.png

I meant the hash rate, and for the last couple of weeks the increase has been fairly linear on a linear scale.
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-10k.png

Wow.  Someone turned on some miners right after the difficulty change.  Uggg.

I would guess that the DDOS on Gox had something to do with the decline in volume, since it coincided with the attack. Also, coinpal went down at the same time and if I'm not mistaken mndrix used Gox to balance out his accounts. I think those two incidents have far more to do with the volume change than a couple experienced investors, but I could be wrong.

At the current rate over the last 9 blocks— assuming that the mining capacity doesn't change at all— the next difficulty will be around 217126. The rate of the last hundred blocks gives 172708... assuming that http://blockexplorer.com/q/nethash/100 actually computes the rate correctly across a difficulty change. I'd consider this an absolute lower bound.

The formula for this is hashes_per_second/((2^256 / (65535 * 2^208.))/600.) = difficulty.

If the continues rate of hashing growth continues at the current rate of ~2.5%/day then my first number becomes 243254  and the second number becomes 193492.

A more conservative growth assumption of 2%/day gives 189111, which I think I'd make my likely lower bound estimate.

Thanks. Very usefull info there!

Holy crap. almost 700 Ghash/s of power just popped up on the network.  We're currently sitting at 1.852 Thash.

did the mystery miner come back?

if all that new power doesn't go away soon, we're looking at a 100k jump in difficulty next adjustment, in about 8 days.

Which is why difficulty should have been tied to something aside from hash speed.
Someone like Mystery Miner only has to activate their array for a short time each difficulty cycle and the rest of the network will not have enough time to lower the difficulty in correct proportion.
Essentially an attack.

... No.  It's all linear and over the whole period.  It doesn't matter where in the window you run your hashing, all hashing has the same effect on the difficulty.

Now that difficulty is at 157,426, I'm wondering what you guys plan to do? Add more rigs ;)? Who here plans to stop mining?

I would not consider that an attack. I would consider it competition.

I would never bet on something that can be manipulated by another bettor.

I don't think you should call things attacks until you understand how the network works.

my mining with my not-yet-week-old card will continue until it is no longer profitable.  which at current power rates and bitcoin prices, would be about 1.3 million difficulty.

BTC just went to $5 on Mt.Gox ... need to get out that damned calculator again ... anybody got a good spreadsheet?

due to popularity i would say between 250000-280000. Moreover i would say that 10$/btc is very close and at the end of the year
i cannot imagine how high it could be!

$10 very close as in a few months? Dang. That would be something! But in the end I personally care more about how many people are actively using bitcoins to exchange value than simply a high btc/usd exchange rate. Why might you ask, well it's simply because if there isn't enough economic activity to back that high valuation the the btc/usd exchange rate is unwarranted and unjustified and eventually the market will give it a true valuation which may be much lower than it currently is. The larger the bitcoin economy grows the more stable the btc/usd exchange rate will be.

Well, it's hard enough to manipulte it to go up. Down is even harder (except for people like slush, artforz, etc... who are unlikely to do something as boring, counter-productive and extremely costly for them as betting on difficulty and then manipulating it).

However, if someone has a lot of hashing power about to go online, he might well use that "insider knowledge" to his advantage when betting.

I'm with you on not wanting to bet on difficulty, btw.

A bet is a good way of making people actually think about what they believe will happen, though ;). Looking at data on a lively betting platform can give you quite an idea of what people think will happen and probably also what will happen. You even have the "probabilities" of the events right there.

Well no, there is a good technical reason why the bitcoin price has to be higher, simply so that it can support a bigger economy. The detail is that since the number of bitcoins in circulation is strictly limited, around 6 million now and only 10 million by Dec 2012, then to carry a much bigger economy, say for arguments sake a $1 billion economy, then bitcoin needs to valued at around $100.

So if your favourite drug kingpin, brothel owner, poker site owner, tax evading bankster, corrupt politician, undercover CIA agent or just honest joe the plumber wants to move hundreds of thousands of 'dollars' around using bitcoin without making a blip in the market they need to be valued higher .... way, way higher.

True enough, but at the moment the amount of bitcoins out there are greater than the total economic activity of the bitcoin economy. What I'm saying is that the bitcoin economy has to grow into the current number of bitcoins. The only way I can think of this not being the case if the majority (large majority) of current bitcoin holder refuse to let the currency circulate - ie they hoard it.

I do wish a large poker site would adopt bitcoins. That would be a very good bit of news for bitcoin and bitcoin users. The early miners will have a field day as no doubt this news event will push price even higher not just cause of the extra demand for bitcoins but because the news would attract new bitcoin users.

A bit off-topic, sorry, but:

I had to add a note to myself: CLEAN YOUR RIG AFTER EACH DIFFICULTY CHANGE.

Today, my steady goody going mining machine crashed .. I analyzed an increased heat. I could not believe that in my clean (*grin*) living room there is soo much dust. All collected on the air fan filters (do you install them, right?).

Everything went fine again when I cleaned them up. The noise of box went down, too.

So, from now, each 2160 block I will clean them. I promise.

good advice, those fans move a lot of air!

Hm, my miner is running outside on my balkony inside a wooden box (of course with air-in/outtakes). I had to take it out last week to flash the BIOS and checked the case and fans for dust => none. I also use no fan filters.

Pretty weird I don't have dust-related problems.. was expecting this. Maybe the outside air is actually less dusty than inside air.

Bingo, way less, depending on your area of course, e.g. fresh countryside air versus desert shanty. Inside most homes are dust pits, from human and animal dander decaying mostly.

An outside air intake with modest filtering is way better than having box under you desk ... in colder climes it's the best place for it.

If you live near a busy road or in the city and have anything diesel passing by, outside will be much worse and the fumes will make anything else stick.  If you live in the country the air may be better outside then in your house.  Unfortunately the humidity after a rain make leaving a machine outside long term a bad idea. 

Okay—  so I was off by 0.36%, so sue me.

So... I'm closer, new diff is 244139, I'm off by -8.9%

Did anyone else get closer?

My guess was 245-250,000. I think I just deleted the post when trying to quote it, oops. I lose by Price is Right rules, I was pretty close even though I went over. I wish everyone was right when they were saying 170,000-220,000.

you win ;)

I think you are the single greatest comfort to me right now. I've been freaking out a little about cypherf0x's FPGA claims and the recent jump in difficulty. :-/

Do you think GPU mining will remain profitable for at least another year?

NOPE. GPUs are going the way of Barney the dinosaur ! Just like the CPUs before them. GPUs were never made for mining in the first place LOL ! FPGAs and such custom hardware can be made for anything the designer wants. They are vastly superior ! You can stack them high too LOL !

what claims?