Bitcoin Forum

Since the price of Bitcoin has been climbing and doesn't seem to be done since SegWit is upon us, would it now be worth it to mine Bitcoins?

After all, the block sizes and difficulty don't change until every 4 years, despite what the price may be.

If the price goes to $4000 or $5000, I suspect there will be a surge in mining activity. Just want to get thoughts from BitcoinTalk members before I make a conclusion.

Bitcoin has nearly always been worth mining, otherwise it wouldn't have miners would it? It just depends on your electricity rate. You also probably need to use the latest ASICs.

The block size NEVER changes unless there is a hard fork, which requires consensus. I suppose you mean block reward which halves every 210000 blocks. That is about 4 years.
The mining difficulty readjusts every 2016 blocks (which is about 2 weeks) so as to maintain a 10 minute block time. It has always been this way.

The total network hashing power (or mining activity as you call it) does not usually reflect price changes unless the price declines very steeply in a very short amount of time.

You may have other misconceptions about Bitcoin like the ones above, I'd suggest you Google and read stuff. https://en.bitcoin.it is a very good learning source.

price and mining difficulty always tend to balance after some time. it's an open dynamic market. So definitely good for those who are mining or holding if price goes up

I don't have any misconceptions I was simply asking a question about the profitability of mining to people who actually do mine Bitcoins for a living.

I was wondering if the people who have been mining Bitcoins are making more than they did before. That is all.

Profitability is up some on Bitcoin mining - not to it's all-time high, but better than any time in the last month or so.
It's not been UNPROFITABLE if you have very very low electric cost at ANY point in the last several years, you just had to work the numbers on if upgrading your miners was going to cost more than the return (and even THEN good timing and proper "due dilligence" would have kept you able to achieve 100%+ ROI at any point in the last several years).



 Total network hashrate DOES reflect price changes - eventually - but there's always a lag since it takes time to buy enough miners to match a price jump (especially in these days of S9 dominance when Bitmain CAN'T MAKE ENOUGH of the things to keep up with the demand).

By misconceptions I meant what you said about the block size and difficulty changing every 4 years which is completely false.
This, although unrelated to your question, was evidently due to lack of knowledge on how Bitcoin works which is why I linked the Bitcoin wiki.

It's worth mining Bitcoins as long as you have cheap electricity. You most likely need to keep up with the latest ASICs though because they quickly become obsolete once a new one is released.

Was it ever not profitable to mine?

I doubt everyone would be mining if they were only losing money.

Maybe when the price was $250 after bottoming out from the 2014 peak, but otherwise I can't see how they are losing money now as fees are absolutely through the roof compared to before.

Maybe op wanted to say, if it does worth mining bitcoin again since price going up rapidly. There were times mining was less profitable but I doubt there were no times exist that mining was not profitable at all.