Bitcoin Forum

So I don't understand the halving very well, will miners just make half as much? Will the price double or the difficulty change? Will bitcoin mining just become so hard it ceases to be cost effective? Am I making a mistake getting into bitcoin mining? Will people just switch to a altcoin? Sorry for all the questions, I'm still learning about bitcoin.

The reward for minning successfully is 25BTC, after halving the reward will drop to 12.5BTC. So miners will not make as much bitcoins as they used to, btc might become more scarce and its price will rise.

So in other words miners will make less but likely not a HUGE amount less?

from what I understand its opposite the coins become more valuable am i wrong?

Only due to supply and demand.
To answer question, yes, miners will be making 50% less of what they were previously.
HOWEVER, due to the value going up, they should be be helped out by the value going up so high.

Mining seems very unsustainable then... if every couple years the reward is halved.

But your forgetting next gen gear that will be coming out.  Some report specs MUCH less better then 1/2 efficiency so we can make us for a lot via new generation of gear.  Which will happen.

But it is not unsustainable due to the large mega mines.  Even at having those paying a few cents likely still remain profitable.  Home miners... yes very much harder in  a lot of cases.  But it is not unsustainable, mining will continue.

Yeah I meant home miners, I am guessing it is going to get harder by a LOT. Still unsustainable in that respect IMHO. But those mega mines like you said will probably remain profitable.

Instead of mining a block and getting a reward of 25 btc the miners will instead get 12.5btc. In another 4 years it's 6.25btc per block. The price will (most likely) go up but it probably won't double just because of the halving. After all, there are already 15+ million Bitcoins in existence (minus any that were lost)

You still are not taking next gen gear into equation though.  It is already hard for a lot of home miners, this is due to not having cheap electricity.  This already happened before the having, so nothing new for it to remain same after havining.

So the ones able to do it profitable now I see new gear allowing them to keep going.  It will get harder (just is the trend were on) but unsustainable is not true for those with cheap electricity.

No one knows what the 1/2 ing will do to the price of btc.

No one knows how difficulty will be affected.

We know 1 thing blocks will pay 12.5 coins not 25.0 coins.

If you are new be careful do not bet or play all you have.

I do a 10000 usd investment .

1/3 coins 1/3 gear 1/3 cash.

Now you may not want to do 10000 investment .

Maybe you are doing less.  Just be a little more cautious about going for,too much when new.

at best is the same, the value go up but the halving will destroy the increase, so miners will make the same amount of earning

this assuming the value will really go up, but hopefully their electricity will save them this time

The block reward will be cut in half. Thus the term "halfing".

 If the hashrate of the network didn't change, that would cut the gross income in half of ALL miners.

 In all probability, some folks running older and no-longer-profitable miners will shut them down, and the network hashrate will see a fairly noticeable drop - but folks buying newer miners, large mining farms upgrading miners, and such will probably kick the hashrate right back up again in a few months at most, possibly less than one month.



 The question of profitability has many variables - cost of electric being a PRIMARY one, if your electric is cheap enough miners like the S7/Avalonn6/BEleven will still be profitable even if the hashrate didn't drop, but their profit will drop a LOT. Miners of the S5/SP20E and older generations will pretty much have to have FREE electricity to still be able to run at a profit. Anything newer will probably be fairly profitable, as it SHOULD be more efficient than the S7 generation by a fair bit.


 The plus side of the upcomming "full custom 14/16nm" generation is that it will have achieved State of the Art on semiconductor manufacturing, so there won't be any major efficiency upgrades for probably 3-5 YEARS - it'll be the first generation where a RoI measured in years is POSSIBLE for Bitcoin miners. This will still leave the issue of "cheap enough electric to make a profit" though....

How would you like to have your income cut in half by a sudden announcement? If you're a masochist, you will enjoy it; if you're not, stay away from getting into mining at this time. Too much uncertainty.

How do you know the price will double? If you're sure, invest in bitcoin directly. Why take a chance at mining, with Diff rising?

Sudden announcement?  We know about having LONG before it happens so sudden announcement is not true at all.   Look at difficulty changes: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty.  We have almost halved not to long ago due to just new gear being plugged in:

Feb 19 2016    163,491,654,909    13.44%    1,170,318,852 GH/s
Feb 07 2016    144,116,447,847    20.06%    1,031,625,717 GH/s
Jan 26 2016    120,033,340,651    5.89%    859,232,121 GH/s
Jan 13 2016    113,354,299,801    9.12%    811,421,684 GH/s

Jan 13 - Feb 19.  Look at those stats so having... we can cause losing 1/2 of mining income due to normal expansion.  And no one can be sure on what will happen on having or what pricing will be.  

To add to notlist3d's comment

@talks_cheep This is going to be a "long shot" but the next halving (12.5 to 6.25) I believe will happen around block 630,000 ;) Now that you've been warned of the next one happening you can prepare.

to me  that one will be more important then this one.  I will weather this okay  maybe not good or great but at least okay.

A lot I think will depend on value to.  And that is where speculation becomes hard as value predicting months away... just is tough.  I don't think most can do it accurately.

So me weathering the having really depends on value I think.   Also next gen can possibly become a factor.... again speculation here is hard to say.  We don't know many final specs, and don't know prices/dates so... a lot right now is up in the air.

That why I sold 9 coins to shift more of my crypto investment to cash.
I still have coins and gear.
I also have the small eth coin farm.
So I have   Four ways to be okay.

I also spread a tad into eth.   I now am mining it for fun (I see it as a hobby).   Not sure how it will end up.   Everyone should keep in mind only to invest what they can lose.  For each person this amount will be different.

For me personally I believe BTC will still have a bright future, but I could be wrong.   But splitting holdings is never a bad idea.

Ok, maybe I didn't make it clear. So, you knew about halving LONG before it happened? Well, so did I. Really. It was all over the forum. I was on the forum in late 2012 when the first halving happened.

I was responding to the original poster who wanted to know if mining will still be viable after halving. Since you fixated on the word "announcement" (which was a poor choice in words, I must admint),

let me fix it:

How would you like to have your income cut in half suddenly? If you're a masochist, you will enjoy it; if you're not, stay away from getting into mining at this time. Too much uncertainty.

How do you know the price will double? If you're sure, invest in bitcoin directly. Why take a chance at mining, with Diff rising?

If you look at bitcoin at all you should see at certain points it has having.... it is known FAR before it happens.   There is no sudden announcement it's part off Bitcoin mining.  It's not that I have some special announcement it happens and is well known.

You are changing your story from it being a sudden announcement to "How would you like to have your income cut in half suddenly?".  So to be clear you are changing your old post question to a new one.   

But the anwser to "How would you like to have your income cut in half suddenly?".  Is it depends on things not known  for example what will bitcoin price do?   If value does not go up and it get's cut in have yes that would stink...... but it still is not "your income cut in half by a sudden announcement?" no matter how you re-word your post.

The existance of halfings at an estimated every 4 year interval (with some variation depending on hashrate variance) was part of the ORIGINAL Bitcoin announcement, years ago.
 This will be the SECOND Bitcoin halfing, not the first - and there's no suprise involved, and no it's not enjoyable to see the income drop but it's been VERY LONG TIME anticipated and expected.
 There was *NO* "sudden announcement" - this is VERY OLD LONG KNOWN NEWS, just because YOU didn't know about it doesn't mean it's new or sudden.


 Just bad timing that the S7 generation showed up when it did, but folks bought them ANYWAY knowing the halfing was comming - the huge hashrate runup was NOT widely anticipated though, and made them unable to achieve RoI for most folks long before the halfing would have done so for many folks anyway.


 My own calculations at MY electric rate (around 8c/kwh most of the year) and as I recall I was initially figuring a 4% rate of diff increase per increase came up with "this thing MIGHT break even. Barely. Forget ROI on the power supplies" even on the initial date of it's release - and every calc I've done SINCE then showed the situation being WORSE, which makes me happy I ignored that generation.

 The NEXT generation though, coupled with my planned move to a land of VERY VERY cheap electric, should make the NEXT generation of Bitcoin miners viable for me.



 Then there's the wild cards - altcoin mining options.
 Litecoin in particular actually has gotten MORE profitable from the timeframe about 2 months before it's halfing last summer (when it was running about $1 per coin) to now (it's been consistantly over $3 for about a YEAR now, got there just before it's halfing and has stayed, even pushing $4 occasionally the last couple months).

 I don't anticipate that happening to Bitcoin, which is a MUCH larger ecosystem, but I do anticipate SOME price increase between now and the halfing, probably with a little fallback afterwards.


 The most recent Bitcoin "wild card" was around Novemberish last year, when the Chinese exchanges suddenly started being "able to accept fiat payments" again - and tons of Chinese cash poured in and more-or-less doubled the price of Bitcoin over the course of a couple weeks, which price has since slipped back down a bit but is STILL right around double what is was last summer - and made up for most of the climb in difficulty (and for a while MORE than made up for it) since Bitmain started shipping the S7.
 I dont' anticipate anything like THAT happening again - but one never knows when the next major news that directly affects Bitcoin will happen to push the price around....

i have the following thoughts:

1. too many scammers in bitcoin, recent episode non-withstanding.
2. POW is a generally an idea that is causing too much effort spent on mining to support just a few transactions. It is unclear yet how to do POS.
3. large pools abusing smaller pools-read about it in pools/kano. an extreme case of schadenfreude.
4. mining centralization by large pools.
5. blockchain might be adapted in the future to do nefarious things. Orwell on steroids.

I have no idea whether bitcoin will apppreciate-it might, but long term i think that it's idea was premature.
Current financial system is on an 'interesting" path.
Creator(s) of bitcoin would be served better if he/they waited until the current system run it's course fully before trying something new.
For once, the uptake might have been faster and more positive.

Lesser numbers of bitcoins will be produced after the halving, so the bitcoins on ground will sell at a higher price. Miners will still make profit, then there is the transaction fee which acts as a supplementary income.

We have no idea what price will be at having.  Will we see a doubling in value? I don't think it will be that extreme I think it will take a while... but I could be wrong and hope I am it's all speculation.

Fact is we cannot say what value will be there are some mega farms that at having are still going to be profitable due to very cheap electricity.  What will be the new electricity number conidered needed at having to remain profitable?  Will new gear hit around having changing that? It's all kinda up in air and speculation.

But we cant really confirm a blanket statement like "Miners will still make profit, then there is the transaction fee which acts as a supplementary income.". 

you wish...even, it may looks logical, this is not true at all..

As it has always been marginal miners will move on, some will operate at a loss hoping for fiat gains and big farms will make a profit as the marginal miners drop off.

The current number of transactions in a block, times their BTC amount is just minuscule. I think if you were to look at how many blocks that carry transactions (some don't), you'll find that they are maybe 1% of the size of the 25 BTC reward there now. After the "halving", transactions will still be a mere pittance compared to the 12.5 BTC reward.

The total mining infrastructure of today is 99% focused on the block reward in the blocks. Transaction fees are strictly a tiny bonus.

And it might change after having but some pools keep transaction fee's they are so little, people don't seem to mind.   Biggest is antpool that does this and they have a huge userbase.   

So I forsee the block reward still being the main prize so to speak for miners after having still.

even at 1 btc reward per block, transaction will be negligeable, because they still would earn 144 coins per day, but they would come close enough

now we have around 50 btc as a fee each day, so around 2036 they would match the block reward

There's no time like the present. And though it's still under the radar the amount of progess it's made in seven years is kinda insane when you think about it. Someone from 2011/12 reading this forum now would think it was 2026 instead of 2016. Every day it's still trucking is a building block for the future.

A lot of equipment is in place for BTC and other alt coins.

If 1400ph is the true network and the newtwork was all s-7  .

 That is 213 x 4.7th for 1 ph  so  1400 x 213 = 298,200 s-7s + 298,200 ant miner psus

the current retail value of 1 s-7 and 1 psu is   590 usd x  298,200  so the network is worth 175,938,000  in gear alone

add in a lot more then that since other gear cost more and we have more then 200,000,000 in gear.

Gpus for eth coin do 2,600gh 

  so a 390 is  26 mh  100 is 2.6gh

 100,000  amd 390's is the eth network  so say 375 x 100,000 = 37,500,000 in gear

 I tacked on some more the the value of a 390 since a pc has to be built to run the 390 card.


so right now more then 240,000,000 in gear for eth coin and bit coin

After the halving I believe one thing is for sure: the price of BTC will rise, by how much, I don't know at all and I can safely assume that no one here knows.
I am not a miner, but if I were one, I will not sell a single bitcoin at loss, and I think many share my idea. I would keep mining for a month maybe and if the price of BTC rises enough to make me profit I will keep on, if it doesn't I will turn to more profitable altcoins.

The thing is all investors know about having so it is not like its going to sneak up on us.  I don't see having day as something that will be a instant big bump in value.  My hope is we slowly gain value on BTC before having... it's been pretty slow.

On more profitable alt coins it is more like "coin" there is ETH.   That is pretty much what every GPU miner out there is mining right now.   I hope it is a sucess we will see long term.  Difficulty continues to climb with more people building etherium rigs (Including myself).   I have not went crazy into GPU just yet as I really want to see what difficulty does on ETH.

This is an interesting topic because a lot of people still have it in their heads bitcoin mining is a hobbyist thing. Bitcoin is big business now and the halving is not some big scary thing for businesses. You just calculate the difference in profit vs operating costs and make sure you do not screw yourself on forecasting and everything will eventually level out again. As much as people on here dont seem to want to accept it, home miners just do not matter anymore. You cant be mainstream tech and rely on joe random processing your payments with a few patchwork mining machines setup in his garage.

ever since there was a machine designed just for mining bitcoin, entire idea of bitcoin became manufacture companies profiting.
When you could literally make money better than others by special equipment and you can produce those equipment, what happens?
Nothing except you profit the most out of doing it.
So what they did was to made riches more and more richer and let you and me to make it even more profitable by participating.

It may still be profitable assuming the price will soar high around $800 or so. if those miners mine coins when the value was still $250, they will still be mining later.

Mining companies i think will still mine too, theres just too much at stake now as they've invested a lot for those devices.

If the price did shoot that high, I would be very glad for all the coins I have bought over time and HODLed. I am already in the black with this venture at current prices.

A lot of S4/S5 miners would not be able to profit for profit after the halving. Reaching to 800 doesn't seem to something that will happen though, but if it would happen a lot of people would make an enormous profit if they bought bitcoin and even outdated miners can mine at profit to some extent.