Bitcoin Forum

I've been reading a good bit on the forum and there is a very mixed bag of opinions.

To use the bitcoin profit calculator what is the best method to assume the difficulty is going up a certain level ?

http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/

I see the "Profitability decline per year" -- what does this equal in terms of increasing the difficulty ? And what is a realistic number to use here assuming everyone will be getting the Run #2 ASICs online soon ?

Whatever numbers I punch in, I see profit ;)

Try putting in couple of zeros at the end of current difficulty

What I am primarily wondering is the remainder of this year; I assume that once the ASICs are everywhere it will get wacky.

Say, for example, someone brought a 60 GH machine online by the end of this month and ran it all year; what would they be looking at realistically ?

How on earth is anyone to know? All you can do is predict the sum of the BfL pre-order, Avalon including total chip orders and ASICminer's expectations and assume the effect on hashrate.

That's what I do. I want to make sure that whatever I buy can still be viable if the network is 100x what it is now.

organofcorti does some predictions on his blog.

http://organofcorti.blogspot.de/2013/05/weekly-network-forecast-13th-may-2013.html

I can't find the exact link I was looking for but you can start with the link above.

Have fun reading,
QG

Going by the split opinion on the value of the Block Erupter, you can probably work backwards from there.
Even with a current return of 0.41btc /Mth many people think this will never cover ROI of approx 2Btc, or only just if it does.

Personally, I think if you don't get in asap on an Avalon chip buy it's probably better to wait for 2gen ASICS because you'll just be behind so many others it won't be worth it unless you can get something for a steal (which won't happen).  Or you could buy AsicMiner shares ;)

My very rough, very quick calculations:

http://img62.imageshack.us/img62/4678/avalonm.png

This is assuming an 18% increase in difficulty each checkpoint. Which I understand is about every 2 weeks??

this is more reasonable

With difficulty rising that fast seems pretty rough.

Is that a pretty well accepted view of difficulty with the way things are going ? Even with all the BFL units failing to ship ?

Almost, but not quite - if the difficulty increases by 18%, then the time to reach that change will be 18% less than 2 weeks. (because the 2016 blocks were found 18% faster).

I think it'll rise faster than 18% for some time starting soon, but then settle down below that, so that Summer/Autumn will have higher difficulties but 2014 Spring could have lower ones than what's in that table. But as said, it's just guesses...


Close, but it's actually 1/1.18 ~ 0.85 or 15% less than 2 weeks. 100% increase would be 50% less, or 1 week etc.

Good catch, I stand corrected.

Can anyone give me a realistic formula to use when calculating the difficultly increase?

It's all speculation at this point  :P

You can look at historical growth rates. Recently it has been slighter over 1% per day, and it will probably continue like that for a few months as ASICs continue coming online. Beyond a few months there's no telling what will happen.

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/growth.png

assume 50% increase month after month until August or September. If all the avalon chips come online, even more.

Nice chart! Hopefully Avalon ships fast full units.

Gigahashes per second are the new megahashes per second.
Purchased GPUs are almost at end of life, maybe a couple months left in them.
FPGAs will be profitable in USD for some time to come (presuming a stable exchange rate of USD/BTC) because they are very power efficient.
ASICs will continue to get faster making the ones we see today look like snails.
If you could buy an Avalon today, it would definitely pay for itself and some healthy profit besides.

Nice chart! Hopefully they WILL NOT ::) (Sorry man ;) )

Avalon calculated the ROI of their units to be 1 month from delivery.  They did this to the best of their ability.  Any variance from this will be from a large input of unexpected hashing power.

That must have been quite some time ago :) Unexpected hashing power? Meaning they didn't expect any other ASICs to come on-line (like ASICminer)? Hm.

Meaning some independent developer who doesn't visit these boards comes online with a bunch of hashing power.  They are aware of asicminer.

What I meant was Avalon's ROI might have been 1 month in the beginning of batch 1. Now it's many many months and the second batch hasn't even been delivered yet (fully). Anyway, that was to be expected.

To expand on the question a bit; if bitcoin prices went to 1000+ USD per coin then the machine would stay profitable.

According to the BTC profit calculator even at 1 billion difficulty an Avalon would produce $834 or so after electricity per month with a $1,000 USD per coin value.

Does this seem at all probable to see this type of value ?

From the Avalon homepage:


How is each batch’s unit price determined?

The price of each unit is the current mining difficulty which at the time of writing, just got readjusted to about 6,695,826. We take that number and multiply it by two ( predicting the network speed will double. ) and calculate the return in a thirty day window, which is about 75 bitcoins. See this site for more details.