Bitcoin Forum

I think that the main problem with bitcoin mining is its block size limit. The network won't increase the limit but will continue to increase the difficulty (somehow) and will reduce the payments. (Apparently by around June next year the reward will half).

You can speculate all day long and we don't know what will happen at having.  Us miners hope BTC goes up in value (which it has been doing).   But it's so hard to say.

I mean by having they might have a miner with 2x the efficiency of today... we don't know.  Factors like better miners, higher btc value, among other things could make having not bad.  Or it could suck and be horrible.... we just don't know.

Reduced mining reward will lead in many bitcoin companies, if they havn't already done so, of moving to CHINA. Just to bitcoin mine. I am informed the charges of electricity are cheaper there.

the difficulty will not increase indefinitely, right now there is an increase because new efficient miners are on the market, when there will be full distrubution of these the diff will stop again

miners know that with the next halving they must have  amargin of profit, from now already, so keep increasing the diff beyond their best efficiency it's not a good strategy

I don't know why, but I am confident enough that the block size limit will be solved and increased (I don't know by how much thouugh) after the next conference in Hong Kong in the December.

I don't think that Bitcoin devs are stupid and they will choose the best thing for the adoption, block size increase and for the security of the network as well.

 There are quite a few places in the world that can match the lowest electric rates in China quite closely, or even beat them.
 One small such area of them happens to be in the USA.
 Others can get very close, with a lower average ambient temperature to make cooling trivial.

 There are many factors involved in why a lot of big mines are in China, electric is NOT the only factor to consider.

 diff increases never stopped, though they DID drop to an average of appx. 1.6% per increment for the first half of this year or so - despite NO new miners showing up in that timeframe.

 I would estimate diff will see average 4-5% for the next 8-10 months as the "currently new gen" miners get widely deployed, then flatten out some for a while, then one last big "months of jumps" when the full-custom 14/16NM generation chips/miners start getting widely deployed, then a very LONG slow climb period after that as no new technology will be available for a while to push efficiencies up a lot.

Is the block size limit a problem?  Yes.  While right now the block reward is sufficient for most miners to be happily compensated for their work, that will not remain so for long.  The supply of coins is finite.  The idea is that as the block rewards go down, the transaction fees go up to compensate.  How do you get more transaction fees per block?  By including more transactions, or by charging more per transaction.  If we want to include more transactions, we need to be able to have bigger blocks.  Remember, the network itself will continually adjust to maintain its "10 minute per block" timeline.  Therefore, as more and more transactions are coming in during those 10 minutes, the blocks need to be able to be created large enough to contain all of the them.

Of course, a ton of pools are going to have to retool their code (AntPool for example) because they keep the transaction fees for themselves.

Doubtful, you can find just as cheap hosting rates in the United States.  You can even have some "green" power in America and still get that low low price.

Beat them? USA has 0.02$/kWh? If it does, i'd really like to know where and how. Québec has nearly it, in big industrial setup and its much closer than China. I also hear Venezuela's is ultra super cheap. Talking about near-free cheap comparing to its cost in US cents.

what i mean is that there are long window of months where you can actually hope for a flat diff, and you can use those months to earn more, if you sell right away after those months end

and anyway the efficiency will not continue to improve as such rate, at some point tthe difference will be negligeable, and they would be forced to  use something else than silicon