Bitcoin Forum

First 25 BTC block will probably be mined on 2012-12-08.

I remember thinking when I first got into Bitcoin, "Block reward halfing wont be for a long time"

Here were are... getting closer... getting better  ;D

Blocks fly, don't they? ;)

Like my grandmother always used to say..."A watched block never halves"

and what exactly are we speculating here?  ??? I guess the date the first block will be mined, but then that's not economics..

I speculate the first 25BTC block will be mined on 21/12/2012 00:00:01 UTC and will in turn be sold for $13US/BTC

The Mayans predicted the block halving  :D

Thats funny right there..  Which will come first the end of the world or the block halving... Oh wait.. same thing ;)

that sure must be a signal :D

That's a t-shirt.

Just think how long it will take for FPGA miners buying new kit to pay that stuff off assuming
the price stays under 6-7 for the next year!

ouch.

In the next year? They *WON'T* pay it off! You would have to be extremely bullish -- or just plain foolish -- to think a $500 FPGA mining card is a good investment right now. Let's just assume they're so power efficient that there's no "cost" to run them. And let's assume that you've got a really good model like the X6500 that can do 400 MHash/s. Even skipping the halving of the BTC reward, right now at the current difficulty (and again, let's assume that it doesn't increase, just for our estimate), your current reward will be around 0.23BTC per day, or 6.9BTC per month, or 84BTC per year. If the (current) $5.6 per BTC price, and the difficulty, and reward all stayed constant, you would pay off the $560 FPGA in just over 14 months.

But let's be more accurate. Technically, that FPGA will use 16.5W, and the system it's in will likely use at least 35W, so really you're looking at 50W or 1.2 kWh per day, or 438 kWh per year. That works out to a cost in power of $44 per year if we go with the typical "$0.10 per kWh" figure many use. For six months, assuming difficulty stays constant, you will spend $3.60 per month on power, and you will mine $38.60 in BTC, giving you a net profit of $35 per month. After six months, the reduced reward goes into effect, and if difficulty, price, and everything else stays constant you will suddenly drop to earning 3.45 BTC per month, or $19.32, for a net profit of only $15.72. At that rate, it would take nearly three years to pay for the cost of the FPGA.

Hell, let's be really generous. Let's say you run six FPGA miners off of one system so that you maximize efficiency. Now, the miners all use 16.5W each, and realistically your system will probably be using more power as the CPU will have to do more work. But if you can run everything off of a 45W i7-3770T (http://ark.intel.com/products/65525/Intel-Core-i7-3770T-Processor-(8M-Cache-up-to-3_70-GHz)), and your mobo and RAM and storage all use 15W, you're now drawing 160W from the PSU, so with an 85% efficient PSU you're using 188W. Per year, if you live in a place where you pay $0.07 per kWh, you will spend $115 on power, or if you pay a more likely $0.10 per kWh you spend $165 on power. With the six FPGAs now active, you're mining 1.37 BTC per day for six months (250BTC), and then the block reward halves and you get 125BTC for the next six months. If we just round off and say BTC prices average $7.00 over the course of the year, you make $2625 from selling BTC. Your hardware costs for just the FPGA mining equipment is $3360. You'll still take nearly eighteen months to pay off just the FPGA hardware. Whew!

But if you fund it through GLBSE you might get your equipment cost back right away..

Exactly.  I have been watching these IPO's on GLBSE, and investing in them.  It is amazing how much capital they can raise in a week.  Then they go out and buy the hardware, and within weeks are returning the investment to their investors at 2% or more!  I've been mining for over a year now, and I even ran a mining pool called BitcoinMonkey, so I have the technical backing to do such a thing.  I just wish I had somebody to help me with the business side of things to get something like that rolling.  Even if I could just pick their brains for a little while to get a better idea of how to execute that sort of thing.

Maybe you should talk to Usagi of the BMF who has been interviewing various mining companies

Well, you can get nearly 3:1 odds with that wager:
 - http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=312

Here's another thread on the topic:
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67185.0

When ASIC mining comes online, blocks will be generated much faster before the difficulty adjusts to it. I'm betting that the reward halving will be much earlier than the current projections.

In fact, if the ASIC miners are smart, they bring their hardware online right after a difficulty adjustment.

I don't think the price of bitcoins are going to go up after the reward changes.  I would wager that they're going to remain the same or go down.  Markets don't like volatility or unknowns so with all the speculation, I think it's going to have a negative effect on the exchange rate.  The first thing I would figure happening is a difficulty change, as many GPU miners will shut down because of the reduced block reward vs. energy costs not being worth it. 

Wow 25 BTC for $13 that's $0.52 per BTC. I'm guessing you aren't a bull? ;)

What part of $13 per BTC didn't you understand? ::)

Lol apparently the entire part  :D

Wow I actually read it twice.....  ::)

Better to let them sit a while and get nothing during the first period they are available? Did you do the math on that?

I think you got it wrong here. Markets have no emotions.
Look at markets here experiencing high volatility:

http://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Emotionless_352dea_817480.jpg


In fact volatility has, at least for bitcoins, no effect on price in terms of long term development. Price is only the expression of future expected value. Volatility rather determents the character of the underlying security and attracts the according crowd. High volatility markets are traded by risk takers and avoided by conservative finacial actors that look for predictable price developments. If you mean by markets: market makers, than let me tell you: They fucking love volatility! Just have a look at volatile times in contrast to stable times and the volume traded in those. More people trade in times of volatility at higher stakes.

About the price drop/rise after reward change: I think it can only positively reflect on prices as supply always goes down, while demand can be expected to go up for a long time. Maybe sudden surges will not be huge, but I expect a smaller rally for 1-2 month before and after the event, just because people think that other people think they will buy and because its such a widely known and expected event. The culminating rise in price may not be as stark, because even today traders take into account the rise in value thats expected and thus buy now to be ahead of the market, triggering a slow appreciation of price long before the supply shortage actually comes into effect.