Bitcoin Forum

Since this is speculation...I did not want to post it in hardware.
Seriously...people are continually buying miners at an incredible speed, adding 80-100 petahashes (10%) each 12 days or so.
Avalon's at $1100 and S7 at ~$1000 are flying off the shelves.

I understand the need for playing with new tech as well as gambling or just being very optimistic.
However, this can be accomplished with just one or two of each kind.
Beyond that, I cannot grasp the rational thought behind this at this very moment...however, maybe there is a factor that I am not aware of.  
Perhaps, people are counting on a halving price bump as if it is a given.

I plug in the numbers and it came out that even at a lower end electricity cost, Avalon and/or S7 is $750-900 in red by May, when, if the current trend continues, they will seize to become profitable at 9c/kwh.

This is just mining without considering other aspects (development) that I am not talking about here.

I think people slowed down in the last week or so. 2 weeks ago price was looking great at $430 and difficulty wasn't as bad.

Lots of S5 in the classifieds and nobody is buying anything.

I think everybody predicted the difficulty increase but no the price decrease.

I've sold 4 of my S5s via Amazon over the last few weeks.

 They sell, just not fast - and seems like they all sold during Bitcoin price jumps above $400.


 Now if I could get the bloody Post Office to quit yoyoing one of them.....

Yes price increase was doing a good job of offsetting the Difficulty increase, so hopefully the price will recover at some point. However with continued 10% and the halving I just can't see the current generation being profitable at any normal Electricity price?

Far from certain to me that we will see a very large price increase to offset this, more likely is that you will have to have the latest, Bitfury etc 14nm based miners to make money. I think there are going to be a lot of Avalon6 / S7 on the market at some point?


Rich

Perhaps what's on their mind is to buy as much as they could in order to mine and earn as fast as they could so they get some good earnings before the halving and a little bit of faster ROI before the halving and to go by what would they get after it.

I suspect that we have a bit to much Greed and not enough Fear? I think making money with the current generation of miner will involve moving them on a little earlier than you would ideally like in order not to get caught up in the glut as we approach the halving?


Rich

lots of good points.

All my gear will be up for sale in april

I have to do this every year.

My power costs have a summer jump from about 9 cents (counting free heat)

 to 18 cents counting cooling in May.  So all my gear has to move in April.

The current diff is 120 based on 859ph of hash.

Last jump for a four day period we averaged 970ph.

So without any new stuff  we could move from 120 diff to 135 diff

All the yoyo moves have happened since bitfury put up the 40 megawatt plant.

 I suspect they are the biggest force in diff rise.

 avalon6's from blockC are about 1700 and a new amount came in yet to be sold and not all online

so 1700 x 3.3 th = 5.6 ph  if they sell all their other new shipment it will be about 7ph more that is only 12.6ph

s-7's sell and sell a lot  over 70ph based on bitmaintechs  btc addy's  but that is only 80ph

I think bitfury's plant is the driving force of growth.

sept 4   407 ph
jan 26   859 ph

so 452 ph added but more like 600ph

I believe bitfury runs 200 to 350 ph of this growth
I believe they see saw the hash due to the heat it makes

the tractor trailer sized container can handle 1.5 megawatts of power.
All the evidence I see point to them using these or a prototype of these.

http://bitfury.com/products#container-datacenter

https://i.imgur.com/YZbqNsN.png

What is being highlighted is how the price does not "have" to pay friendly compared to mining ROI.    Miner's don't for the most part determine the price of Bitcoin.   It will be interesting to see how this plays out once we get to a point where the newest units are only breakeven ROI.

Well I'm a bit unclear are you 'completely' out due to the btc diff rise and your electric cost rise AFTER say this summer?

so say AFTER this ..do you see a way for yourself to get back into it? (me I know I'm out for good at 13.7c kwh regular and 0.966 kwh winter ..home miner wise when my equip dies)

You'd be the last to fold imho unless ..there was just NO WAY to pull it off...so just making sure is that your view and you are 'out' say by fall 2016...and 'unlikely' ever to return?

Looking at https://blockchain.info/pools, most of the recent difficulty increase seems to come from BTCC pool. Bitfury or bitmain mostly mine in their own pools, so the question is, what is the mysterious force behind BTCC rise?

My personal belief is that the hashing growth is from the large mining farms rolling out 16nm miners.  16nm miners are typically 5 times more energy efficient than miners such as the Antminer S5.  They have obsoleted 28 nm miners.

KNC has had 16nm miners since about June 2015, when their hash rate went from about 15 Petahash to about 35 Petahash.  We know Bitfury has them.   KNC and Bitfury are easy to follow as they are both European groups and need to keep their investors informed of developments.   Who knows what others are doing, especially the China based groups.  I assume they are not sitting idle.

I see teams of technicians currently working along the isles in large mining farms slowly replacing the 28nm miners with 16nm miners.

I do not see the hashing growth as coming from hobbyists with a small number of S7s.

I don't think it's two mysterious it chances are is new gear.  I guess the question is who exactly.   It can be people trying to get last bit out of some miners.  Say for example on S7 chances are they want to pump some out and get most they can before having.

At some point (if not already) bitfury will be pumping out as much as they can.  They have shown video off chips, which most others have not on next gen.  Next gen is what really will be huge when it replaces older gear.  Which some might be doing already.  With most mining companies being privately held, them saying their plans does not really benefit them.

I repeat: there is no significant increase on bitfury and antpool pools. So it's not S7 and not new bitfury machines, it's something else.

Antpool has gone from about 67 Petahash to over 200 Petahash in the last 6 months.

Bitfury has gone from about 60 Petahash to 130 Petahash.

In both cases it has been a continuous increase.  

Almost all pools have at least doubled their hashing in the last 6 months. The only pool who has not grown is 21 Inc which has sat at about 15-20 Petahash.

https://data.bitcoinity.org/bitcoin/hashrate/6m?c=m&r=month&t=l

That is interesting on antpool.  I wonder if possibly they have the miners for batch 10 being made and plugged in.   With holiday's coming up in China I wonder if they would make do some burnin test over their holiday's then ship "Shipping out date: Starting between Feb. 16~20 following order of full payment after we're back from holiday."

I do think they would make all they can off of them even internally before having.

This is a very good point, we often look for single solutions to problems, but I think we have seen across the board rises in Hash rate. Definitely BW.com that I have been watching was at 50PH only a couple of Months ago, recently they were close to 100PH.

Rich

well in my case scrypt miners were the way to go due to difficulty rise not as much as btc etc...so me it was ltc to btc when the ratio of ltc to btc was around 0.01 ltc to btc
it has worked very well mining in 2014 at say a 1.40 coin and moving such to btc when prudent to do so.

as an example Nov 6th 2014 I got my original $10,131.80 KNC Titan (dumb in 20/20 hindsight) and the hash rate if I remember right was 1169 gh current hash rate is (as I look now)
on LTC that is 1449 gh ...so since Nov 6th say 2014 till now Feb 1st 2016 the hash rate (not counting halving of LTC this last summer) has gone up only 19.32% ...too bad Titans are so insanely high now it makes no sense to get one...better off just getting btc or ltc imho...but if you were to trip over one cheap 'grab it" it would have to be 'insanely cheap' like 1.5k to
make it worth while ..just saying


so far (with a 2nd titan bought cheap in the panic of march 2014 on view of bigger badder asic machines coming out which never happened) I have ROI'd but kinda wondering

at 3 buck LTC price etc...WILL anyone EVER invest in new scrypt equipment at these prices...I know they ask for newbie IPO $$ to play and make scrypt data halls and miners
but I mean really?

These Titans 'should have' been with new equip surpassing them 'doorstops' in July 2014...so anyway go figure..but can't see a lot of 'lets throw $$$ at new asics' at current
scrypt and ltc prices ..but then again I know zip....

but I still scratch my head to buy a titan even at 3k (keep 2 cubes) and sell the rest for say 2k as a mini-titan back on ebay as a play... (yeah dumb but i had the home miner
bug bad)


must resist........home mining is dead (I say this mantra often)

But BTC difficulty coming up scares the crap out of me I sure as hell would not put up a BTC data hall in the next 6 months in any way shape or manner if I was a big boy
and could do so...and with no LTC equip no option there




interesting times

I can't run in house from May 1 to Oct 1 as power jumps to 17 and add 1 for ac so power = 18 cents.

I have 1 s-7 with next to free power 2-3 cents.  It is a deal with a friend .  So I will keep that.
I will keep my compac sticks for the compac pool club and run at a loss.
Since I run them in solo they have never earned for me anyway.

When Oct comes round and my power drops to 12.7 - 3 for heat or 9.7 cents I will want something.  Maybe a bitfury if they sell something smaller then 3000 watts at .11 watts a gh



dude bitfury points gear at  f2pool which is now over 230ph

here are 2 payments from f2pool   in 3 days the top miner went from 90 to 97 btc earned.

that is flat rate 100percent - a fee of 4 percent = 96 percent luck same luck every day

It takes  about 1.9 ph of growth for that gain
https://i.imgur.com/iK1z0fj.png


same 3 days pool grew 32 btc in payments   that is around 8.2 ph
bitfury can simply point ph here you won't know it is them
and there are other players out there. like you say

https://i.imgur.com/Kf9wt0D.png

Bitisdom keeps looking pretty ugly still:

Bitcoin Difficulty:    120,033,340,651
Estimated Next Difficulty:    141,261,643,679 (+17.69%)
Adjust time:    After 974 Blocks, About 5.8 days
Hashrate(?):    1,084,629,999 GH/s

Price around 373... so again not way we want  to go.   This change is not going to be fun.

truly brutal numbers

Bitfury, Bitmain, etc. are killing the golden goose.
Do meager 200K transactions/day need above 1 exahashes of security?
Of course, not. This is ridiculous.

and where do you get the 200k transactions number?

 along with that how much coins in the transactions?  a link could help me with that set of  numbers

this link reads 110,000,000 transactions per day


https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-total


this link has btc value

https://blockchain.info/charts/output-volume

I got 200K number by looking at these graphs (one day is less relevant):
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions
and/or
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-excluding-popular

While the chart that calls out 110M transactions isn't completely clear, I interpret it to mean that from Feb 2015 until Feb2016, there were about 50M transactions for that year. 110M /day just doesn't make any sense. Unless Kano isn't playing things straight, the "Transaction Fees" in a block are no more than .3 BTC (roughly). Multiply that by say 200 (a really huge day), and you have 60 BTC in fees? Divide that by 110M and the fee essentially vanishes. It can't that small I don't think.

I looked at it very carefully and that is all the transactions ever made.

So last month 6,000,000 were made so 30 x 200,000 = 6,000,000

So the 200,000 per day is correct. So a 1000ph made about 200000 transactions.

So 200 s-7s = 1 ph


we have 200,000  s-7s. So we use 1 s-7s to do 1 transaction a day

1 s-7s cost about 925.

so a 925 dollar machine using 2-3 dollars in power is doing  1 transaction per day. A transaction fee is 0.0002 btc give or take.

So the math is you lose.

This needs crazy transaction growth to work.  And with block size stuck at under 1 million  how do transactions grow?

0.0002 btc  is about 7.5 us cents.   So the s-7 that cost you 1k and you spend 2 or 3 bucks a day in power is making 1 transaction for a 7.5 cent fee.

Not good.

note I did an edit I had 10 s-7's not 1 s-7 per transaction I had a decimal shifted.

One thing to keep in mind is S7's on batch 10 are not shipping till "Shipping out date: Starting between Feb. 16~20 following order of full payment after we're back from holiday." So for half a month are they filling their own miner spots?  Some big orders? It's hard to say.

And they could build a bunch mine with them and then after running till after holiday's sell as batch 10 chances are making some quick ROI's for them.

Antpool and Bitfury are both supported by its own farms. These two will introduce very fast miner next quarter also.

these numbers do not work  the growth in gear is not sustainable with prices at 370 and transactions at 200,000 a day

This simply has to go bust.  Or zoom.    prices need to be at over 1000 usd for these current numbers to make any sense.

The scary thing is I think some of the big data centers it works with that have a few cent electricity.   So it could stay the same and just drive a lot of little/hobby miners out.   That is not a fun option, but could possibly happen.

I hope it goes zoom as you put it if we could get a jump equal to difficulty change that would be great news.  But so far does not seem price has went zoom or bust.  So hard to speculate in times like this.

I think they still make most money from selling devices, not from hashing (Bitmain at least). So at this production rate all of their customers will never return what they invested into machines, and who will buy the next generation miners? Even the Powerball lottery gives a small ray of hope - someone, somewhere earns money from it.

S7 for $925 with DIR=15% is only profitable at electricity rate < 2.5c/kWH

The difficulty rise the key here. It is too fast recently and when the BitFury 16 nm miner comes out, it will rise further.