Bitcoin Forum

So my question is that since the difficulty of mining could increase in the long term, as it has so far, when will the miner,  for example become ineffective or at least when will its output be reduced to less than 10% as of today.

I am trying to calculate and see the net revenue of a single S9 miner (without assumptions of any cost) and need to know until when will it bear fruit.

Thanks

While it might be a nice theoretical exercise, ignoring electricity, cooling, and Internet costs for running a miner doesn't seem very realistic. An S9 running in a cool, low electricity cost environment remains economically productive far longer than an S9 in a hot, high cost environment. You also can't ignore the price of Bitcoin in you calculations. An S7 (for example) may not be able economical to run when BTC is priced at $1000, and it's just fine when BTC is priced at $5000.

If you want to ignore ALL costs and BTC price, then an S9 will produce something nearly forever. Reality however gets in the way for most folks long before forever.

My magic 8 ball says "reply hazy, please try again"

Depends on what your definition of "ineffective" is.  If it's profitability, then it will be based on your cost to run versus BTC mined.  If it's supposed to be, as you put it "...at least when will its output be reduced to less than 10% as of today."  That would be when the network diff is 10X what it is today.  Looking historically you may or may not get an accurate time interval.  For example, the network diff was 1/10th of what it is now back in January 2016, less than 2 years.

We can actually see how difficult it has become because of the percentage of the bitcoins that has already been mined. I think we still have a long way to go for the current mining rate to reduce around 10%. I think before the end of next year people are going to find it very difficult to mining bitcoin and by then most of the coins must have been mine and the current mining tools we have outdated.