Bitcoin Forum

When do you think the next difficulty change will be?

You can predict it. Just look at how many blocks to go, and divide by the current blocks/hour rate.  That will give you a pretty accurate idea.  Right now it's looking like Friday morning.

It will be another doozy.

How exciting!!!! Less BTC, more competition, less trading, less credibility, lower exchange rate!? What could go wrong?

:)

What does it take to make the difficulty lower?

Bad things to happen, and lots of miners quitting en masse!

It will never get lower.

Why less credibility if its harder to get?  If history has proven anything it is that people usually want what they CAN'T get. And who the hell said the exchange rate will be lower? It might dip for a little bit after MTGOX comes back in, but in 2 weeks everything will be back to normal with bitcoins trading at about $30 a coin.

You steal my very soul from me with your reason......   :-\

You can follow it with this: http://bitcoinwatch.com/ and look at the block statistics.

But it's like 2016 blocks per difficulty increase and the network is doing 260 blocks per day... just a bit under 8 days now.

Basically the faster we do those 2016 blocks, the more it cranks the difficulty... if we did it 50% slower, the difficulty will fall, which will never happen considering the number of new machines being added each and every day.

So I'm really curious who has the intestinal fortitude to keep mining if:

1) The exchange rate stagnates or (ahhhh) goes down!
2) The difficulty rate keeps going up
3) Scandal persists???
4) Other stuff, eg, inlaws can't stand the noise, heat, etc.,   :)

Everyone should halt mining for the next 2 days now.

As the darkness of the Abyss swallows your very words......

When we hit block #210,000.

That's why I've been getting more BTC!  Keep quiting!!!!!!!!

Err..we talking a miners strike here  ;D

Who cares if the scandal persists, you clowns don't understand that exchangers, and bitcoin have nothing to do with each other. I wish all the exchangers would just go away, and let us build our economy up.
The difficulty is going to keep going up, and the miners who are getting started now will be the ones mining in the future. It will get to the point where normal people will not be able to get into it AT ALL, because the mining market will be dominated by its earliest adopters. But what is so wrong with that?

:Grin:

Quoted for possible truth.

For those that don't know, the block reward drops to 25 BTC on (or about) that block. I hope to have a modest cluster on standby that can mine at a slight loss if needed.

That's D-Day -- when everyone either has paid for their mining hardware, or never will...

(When blocks net 25 BTC instead of 50)

Where did you get your crystal ball? I would like to purchase one please.

The same place 90% of the people in this forum got theirs lol.

http://www.glogster.com/media/5/15/4/49/15044913.jpg

Edit: This isn't meant to demoralize my postings, or anyone elses for the matter. It's meant to show that the only real thing that we have, is that bitcoins are here to stay forever. Whether the market crashes in 2 weeks or not, whether difficulty rises or drops, whether the economy grows or not, bitcoins will still be here. Everyone reading this post right now needs to go into this with that kind of mentality, that bitcoins are never going to disappear, and I promise you everyone reading this message right now will be a winner in the future. But it's not going to happen with pump and dump tactics, and smear manipulation.

I hope the difficulty triples. I haven't played video games in a month. And the new American McGee's Alice is out. I hear Duke Nukem sucks, but still. It's Duke Nukem.

What do you mean? Hardware cost is fixed, it just takes longer to recoup the initial investment. You only start losing money when you are paying more in kilowatt hours than you are making in BTC.

ummm... no.


no.  7,000 more per day.


ok - yes.  so?


no.  more trading - as those who are motivated purely by money transition from mining to trading and arbitrage.


no.  more credibility, as the Bitcoin economy diversifies and expands from mining and speculation into trading and arbitrage.


no.  a larger and more diversified Bitcoin economy, with more and more deflation kicking in by design, will inevitably result in a higher exchange rate.

I have a signed x-mas card from 3D Realms that has duke on it, and all the team. Wonder what that is worth in bitcoin land... maybe...

Seeing as I fucked myself good and hard on namecoin speculating, I'll give you 5 namecoins for it.

That exchange sure hasn't moved much in the last three or four days >:(

When the reward goes down to 25 it is just like a 100% difficulty increase. It isn't that big a deal. We've had > 85% difficulty increases and it didn't cause people to quit.

Yeah but it is halved reward + another difficulty increase at the 210k block : )  So a double whammy.

However, I predict people will drop out long before 210k block:

Imagine right now (877k difficulty) you have 1.0Ghash.

You are mining 1.0 coins / 24 hours.

Every 50% difficulty increase drops your mining rate by 2/3.

In 1 50% difficulty  increase (going up to say 1.29M which we'll probably surpass) you are getting 2 coins every 3 days instead of 3, or .66 coins/day.  Hashing power will continue to rise, so this difficulty will only last for 9 days.

In 2 50% difficulty increases from now you are getting .44 coins/day, but again you only get 9-10 days to mine at this difficulty.

in 6 50% difficulty increases from now you are getting .08 coins/day, basically taking 11.3 days to mine just 1 coin. This difficulty is barely 2 months away. In other words, by September we'll be around 7M difficulty.

Most of the miners are not at 1.0 Ghash.  Most are using a single GPU.  So in 6 difficulty increases, even some of the fastest cards will take a full month to mine 1.0 coins.  However since difficulty goes up every 9-12 days, they'll never get that full month at that same difficulty.

In 6 difficulties mining will be silly, and at that point many miners will drop out.

Why?

I was really talking about a snapshot in time. Presently. And I meant less BTC per miner when difficulty goes up but thanks for the detailed analysis.

I explained why, mathematically, in my post.

What part of diminishing returns every 9-12 days doesn't make sense to you?

If you think 0.08 bitcoins / day will be profitable for a 1.0Ghash mining rig, then you must expect that the value of a bitcoin will rise equivalently with the difficulty.

If a BTC is worth $15 at 877k difficulty, then it will need to be worth about $120 at 7M difficulty.

Do you foresee the price of BTC going up tenfold in 60 days?

I seee.... so looking at the history when people were making more than 1BTC a day on their CPU, then suddenly they went under 1 BTC, and some people posted things similar to what you did. Well, some of those people are still around. Also that 1 BTC rose in value 2000 times. You never know what the future holds.

But think for yourself. How many people will want to use bitcoins, how many bitcoins will there be in existence? How much will a bitcoin be worth?

What happens when mining becomes unprofitable? What has happened so far in this circumstance?!

I really hope you're right..

I got to know about this whole btc scam (:P) on may 5th 2011...back then my radeon 6950 used to make around 3 coins per day...back then the price was 3.4$...in approx. 30days the price went up to the all time high of 30ish$..hell i sold 10 coins at 20.6 pounds per coin..thats approx. 33$!!!..yes in 30days the price increased atleast 10 times...will it happen again after the whole mtgox mess? i dunno..but it has happened before..this is no time to get demotivated out of this btc scam..mine and hold..it will be worth it

Yes, I agree that the price rose 2000x.   But people were also able to switch to GPU mining from CPU mining.  There is no reasonable hardware advance on the horizon besides theoretical ASIC cards, which may or may not come to market.  6 difficulties from now, fractional rewards will be psychologically dissuading.

I also clearly stated what the price needs to be to keep the same margin of interest it has now, I didn't say it would not get there, only that it needed to get there to keep value. 

I don't know what the future holds, but unless it does hit $160 in the next 60 days, it won't be profitable any longer.


I am mining and holding : )

I am mining really slowly, with my single GPU.  I didn't even get started until June, totally missed the early-adopter curve.

I would love for 1 BTC to be $100, or $1,000, or $10,000.  

Just cautioning people to not get ridiculous, and to think about everything before they go crazy.

The catch is that every one has 1 penny.  Nearly everyone has $1.  Not as many people have $10.  Fewer have $100.  Fewer still have $1000.

There is not unlimited funding to invest in BTC, nor even in the stock market.  Apple stock is $350/share, Google stock is $550/share.  Stocks can cleverly split when the price gets too far out of the range of what middle-america can invest in.  Not so with bitcoins, they just use fractional amounts.  People will have a built-in antipathy to spend $10 on .01 BTC.

It depends on how that .01 is packaged.

First of all, you're taking world demographics into account, not demographics of Bitcoin investors. Most of us have much more than a thousand dollars. And while people do like to get "more", the antipathy to getting less for more has already been passed, when the price went over $1 USD/1 BTC. $whatever USD/.01 BTC is no different.

Didn't stop Berkshire Hathaway - look up ticker brk.a, never split since it started in 1965.  It started at $19, now worth $114,122

I dropped out of bitcoin mining back in July 2010 after solving two blocks myself on the CPU miner then available.  We had no pools back then and the difficulty jump made it unlikely for me to earn any more coins.

I rejoined mining recently. My current rigs are GPU miners that rate a total 1200 MH/sec.  Assuming projected difficulty trendlines, I suppose that I can mine 50 or so more bitcoins before I'm at cost parity with my daily electric bill of 2.40 USD for the 860 watts consumed - and I operate them without air conditioning.

I'll liquidate the rigs beyond what I need for everyday computing when that time comes.   And I'll be alert for the next cost-efficient mining hardware advance - it could come from ASIC, or perhaps AMD will recognize the bitcoin mining marketplace and develop a variation of their existing GPU architecture for bitcoin mining, e.g. just lots of low-voltage Stream Processing Units.