Bitcoin Forum

How accurate would you say that is?

Past predictions:
Guess   Actual
145M - 148M
170M - 189M
215M - 267.7M
390M - 390.9M
510M - 510.9M
670M - 609.4M
720M - 707.4M
799M - 902.3M
1.1B - 1.18B
1.38B - 1.41B
1.65B - 1.789B
2B - 2.19B
2.6B - 2.61B
3B - 3.12B
3.75B - 3.8B
4B - N/A

 +/- 15%

That's crazy.

Buying new mining hardware right now certainly looks like a fools game.

Yes. The choices are:

• You buy mining equipment and nobody else buys mining equipment (difficulty stops increasing, you win)
• You buy mining equipment and many others also buy mining equipment (difficulty goes up, you lose -ROI)
• You don't buy mining equipment and nobody else buys mining equipment (no income from mining, you lose 0 ROI)
• You don't buy mining equipment and many others buy mining equipment (no income from mining, you lose 0 ROI)

Sound familiar? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma

While it's theoretically possible to win (option 1), if all players act in (what they think is) their own interest and buy mining equipment, the more likely outcome and what we are seeing now is everyone loses (option 2). Thus, the best option is not to play = 0 ROI.

Assuming one believes that BTC will go up in value, I think the best option at this point is to buy BTC directly.

In my opinion, the small potential returns for buying mining hardware right now aren't a good move when adjusted for risk.

Playing SatoshiDICE is more profitable than buying mining rigs now IMHO! ;D

My guess still is 138,000,000

There is a better way, use contracts before develop more.

Just want to point out that number 1 has some latency because factory ordered chips will be deployed no matter how many people end up paying for the final product.  ;)



 

Next   25/09/2013 11:03   260064   150 571 756   x1.34
http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Im guessing it will be a tad more than that, since the trend is clearly up and dot-bit doesnt do any trending.

Last 120 blocks may have been statistically lucky, but with the increased hashrate that may end up being more representative:

Last 120   19/09/2013 20:44   258889-259009   164 194 855   x1.46

fixed

mining is dead get over it, by btc directly

If mining is dead Btc is dead. Mining is no longer a get rich quick scheme, doesn't mean it's dead.

So how are transactions still being processed?

dead for us, not for who produce the miners.

Mining as a profitable venture you can get into now is dead. There's no justification for the mining network to add new participants right now. If BTC price soars in the future, maybe this will change, but if it doesn't increase to, say, $250 by the time of the next halving, the ASICs pre-ordered now may be the same ASICs making up the majority of the hashrate share five years down the road. It's a very possible situation to have no ASIC manufacturers still outputting in a year or two. It'd be like the Cuban automobile situation.

Hu?
The little flaw in your reasoning is that you think hardware prices will remain stable. It makes no sense to buy mining hardware at the current price per GH, but vendor cost per GH, particular variable cost, is more than an order of magnitude lower. What do you think they will do once sales dry up?

Remain dormant, dissolve, or make something else - maybe hardware wallets or possibly even altcoin ASICs. They're not going to operate at a loss, though - same as miners. Hardware prices, so far, haven't been able to come down to a price where it is at all safe to purchase (everything on the market right now, will, if lucky, come a bit below breaking even on investment by the time they arrive at your doorstep), and maybe that's because others are way more risk-tolerant - or just stupid, because now, there isn't a high reward potential unless you decide that factoring in a bullish BTC position is legitimate when you could just buy BTC and enjoy the same rise without the extra risk. When I was still doing larger-scale loans, GPU mining loans were no problem - but even then when FPGAs were still considered a reasonable investment - when the situation looked more rosy, I wouldn't touch anything ASIC. It's always been extremely high-risk, but now the reward potential is consistently, and rapidly, dropping.

ASIC manufacturers don't have a sustainable business model if they're just planning on producing Bitcoin ASICs for years. Unless ASIC prices can come down by 50-75%, or BTC rises 150-250% (or some equalizing combination of the two), ASIC manufacturers are dead in the water unless they have good contingency plans to deal with an over-saturated mining market. I remember - I think it was BitFury or KNC - something like that (RedFury? I can't keep track of all the goofy names) -- they released a USB ASIC at the lowest price-point they could manage while breaking even, and there was very little interest (they claimed they had orders to fill out the first batch, but that just made me assume it was a scammy operation). -Now a smaller-scale USB miner's of course going to have a much lower cost-efficiency than some of these larger, clunky-looking ASICs which're produced in relatively large volume - but I don't think it paints a very favorable picture, as far as ASIC prices being able to come down to a place where it's reasonable to purchase them as an investment without dramatic BTC price appreciation.

Good job of totally missing the obvious. They will lower prices. A 400GH/s hashfast asic costs ~$30 to produce in volume.  Of course at some point mining profitability and production cost will meet and we will get stagnation, but we are at the very least 50PH away from that, and if mining shift to low electrcity cost countries like Russia or some states in the US, possibly more than 500PH.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295270.0

I have no idea how long it will take manufacturers to ship that kind of volume, but its likely gonna be more than 6 or 12 months.


And they never will. If it were truly safe, hardware vendors wouldnt sell, they would mine.



This is true, but you grossly underestimate how low prices can and will go. And once they reach marginal profitability in a few years, well who really cares what they do next,  none of these guys will ever need to work again.

I missed your thread and was operating on bad guesses. Sorry. :)

Though - if 1TH/s = ~$140 retail after chip, PSU, shipping, cables, and whatever else - and it consumes, say 500W (this assumes it's significantly more efficient than babyjet2s, which I don't think an unreasonable assumption. It'll probably be much more efficient than my grim guess) - 6-12 months out (6-8 months out might be okay), and it's hard to justify the cost even if electricity's dirt-cheap (say, $.05/KWh after taxes/fees) - especially if everyone else is going to be mass-ordering these chips, too. At the end of the day, we're all chasing a piece of a 3.6kBTC/day pie (+~100BTC in fees) until the next halving, which is probably significantly less than three years away with the rapid increase of hashpower put on the network. We may not even have much more than two years if upfront costs drop dramatically and the pre-order hysteria keeps up.

-So what do you see in, say, 18 months? Near-complete mining centralization in a small handful of geographic locations with sub-$.05/KWh electricity?

Well, based on assumptions like you just wrote you can calculate where its headed,  just not how fast it will head there. Your guess is as good as mine.
But yes, I do expect the majority of mining (and all of profitable mining)  to eventuallyt move where electricity is cheapest.

And there are some pretty extreme low (subsidized)  prices to be found. In Kuwait the price is fixed at $0.01 per KhW:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-20644964

In russia apparently you can buy electricity for $0.025 per KwH

Those tariffs cant  last forever, as that is well below cost but even if its only for a few more years, its not unreasonable to assume someone will set up shop there and Kuwait would effectively subsidize bitcoin security :)

http://bitcoindifficulty.com is now showing a similar number. This is immense, 112-149..

Getting crazier by the minute. According to blockchain we are at ~1300 TH now. 60 days ago we were barely over 200 TH
https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=60days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=

The scary thing is that this is before the real onslaught of 28nm asics has even begun.
Cant wait to read the sob stories of monarch customers in a few months.

LOL  :D Gotta love those sob stories. Gonna be plenty.

Miners have fucked themselves. So much for electricity savings of the ASICS and decentralization of the network.

Thats quite possibly the shortest yet most accurate description of the current mining market Ive read so far :)


"Electricity savings" per GH is of course still true. But if anyone thought migrating from GPUs & FPGA's to ASICs would lower the overal's networks electricity use, then they didnt think it through. Its quite the opposite: since ASICs are so cheap to produce, the bulk of the miners cost would inevitably  shift from hardware purchase / write off to electricity. GPU's and FPGA were never going to become as cheap "per watt" as bitcoin asics eventually will,  because they are in demand for other applications.

As for decentralization, Im not sure we are headed towards a problem in that regard. At least not in the long run, in the short run it might be possible for someone to grab a non trivial % of the network, but since pretty much all those 28nm chips are primarily being sold to miners, Im not too worried.

looking forward for winter 2014/15. Ill have free power and it looks like you'll get aisics for the scrap value ::)

They will cost about the same as an electrical heater, and earn you about as much :)

We'll hit 148.255.918 today, so the OP's projection was not that much off. What's next? 200.000.000?  :'(

Same idea as electric cars.  Suppose to solve a problem, instead it creates more, different problems.

Electricity draw by ASICs went through the roof, decentralization?  Well, look at what Avalon, ASICMiner and now bitfury has done to
decentralize the network.

I was happy mining with my three 7970s last year, pulling 500W from the wall, now I pull >5000W with the ASICs.
Is the network any better, safer?

Network decentralisation is measured by the number of pools/solo miners, not by the number of ASICs.

However, the more hashing power is pushed into the network, the harder it is to mount a 51% attack for any single party, so yes, security has grown.

As for power. I too had 3x7970 + 3x6770 + 6570, pulling ~1125Watts (3x250+3x95+90) for 2400MHs
I now have 145 BEs, which cumulatively pull ~370W for 48575MH/s, while still generating more coins than the GPUs did at the beginning of this year.

How many ASICs have you mounted to pull 5000W?  :o

Well, pretty accurate then...

Phew, 149M.  My daily income dropped from a feeble BTC0.13 to a even more feeble BTC0.9.  :'(

Fun fact. Even if hashrate remains stable at the current ~1200TH, so BFL, AM, BF and others stop shipping and deploying, next difficulty will be ~168M.
But its not so much the next one Im looking forward to, as the one after that. Assuming KnC stays roughly on target.

Its better to buy Bitcoin, wait for it to appreciate, and then buy a mining rig. So technically you spent less USD on the rig, and hardware power $/terrahs will also get cheaper over time

That would be an increase then :)

Difficulty is increased because of added new mining devices.
As I know - mining devices now are produced and shipped in big quantity only by BFL.
Last 4 increases all were around 30% (29.4% - 32.22%). This coincidence (almost same percentage increase 4 times in a row) never happened before.

Does it mean that BFL specially ships devices not in their full potential, but in specially calculated quantities to keep this 30% increase ratio?
And, possibly, all who are now still waiting for their BFL device - could have them delivered month ago if only BFL would ship all at their full potential?

What? Isn't BFL the one that screwed everyone over?

Nope. They were wanking for more than a year, but now everything is somehow in delivery stage. Last time I have checked - everything from year 2012 is already shipped to customers, so they have only nine months of orders to deliver :) . And they constantly ship devices, all this is legitimate, nobody is screwed. Except fact that nobody who will receive now their device will make ROI. I am sad for guys who ordered 500GH/s device :/

But still, they have huuuge amount of TH/s to deliver, and they can keep difficulty increase on any level they want. This sucks.

BFL isnt the only one shipping, Bitfury's are selling like hot cakes too.
As for BFL doing this on purpose.. perhaps. Artificially keeping difficulty low would have given them a lot longer to sell more preorders at higher prices. It would also cost them customers and credibility but Im quite willing to assume overall its a net win for them. Then again there is Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity. Or in this case, incompetence. Im just on the fence whether or not incompetence alone explaines this kind of shipping clusterfuck.

I wish lol.  0.09 :D

Difficulty just increased to 148,819,200 (+32%).

So OP was pretty much spot on!

@baritus: I'm sure at least a little bit of luck was involved, but still, well done!

Let's see if I can predict this right.

I'm going to say between 176-180m.

IM saying 202M

Bitcoin Testnet difficulty is 494. *cough* *cough*. Just saying.

How does that help us out at all?

Still think they are going to be worth something I guess?

I think he was meaning that none of the companies are testing products on testnet?

No, I actually was a longtime supporter of the idea that testnet coins should have value so there is an economic incentive for people to play with all the technology that's enabled on testnet but disabled on the regular bitcoin network because nobody knows what might happen. I don't think I'm the only one however as obviously there are other people mining and I doubt it's companies testing, because at this point, the only reasonable thing to do is test by mining yourself coins.

Higher.

Next difficulty (estimate): 195,903,813
http://bitcoindifficulty.com/

Next 199,980,104 x1.34
http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Thats presumably before any KnC machines where turned on.

As of today, they have only shipped the first month + (maybe a week or two) worth of 2012 MiniRigs orders. Also the MiniRigs are 1.5 TH not 500GH(They are shipping them as 3 500GH machines.(Note: This is whole heartily due to their incompetence. Spelled it out as amazingly plenty of people are still ignorant to this.)).

There is no suck thing as nobody is screwed. Everyone is screwed as BFL greedily oversold and has saturated the market. They have no concern for their customers or Bitcoin. If they did, they would have taken X number of announced orders and shipped those orders before taking more orders and been open about the volume of sales. Instead they took the path of deceit and lies.

It's crazy. Since ASICs hit the market difficulty went sky high.

I'm definitely thinking next difficulty will be closer to 205M!!

My guess: 245MM. Do I get a cake if i got it right? :)

~181000000

I guess between 180M and 184M.

I am considering KNC hardware will not hash in this timeframe.

My guess 193,000,000

Yes.

But you're not going to be right.

Also the cake is a lie.

Yep... You'll be baked, and then there'll be cake.

Network speed increase seems to be easing a bit temporarily. Looks like the next D increase may be relatively minor, all things considered:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-small-lin-2k.png


Of course that will be the proverbial calm before the storm if KnC starts shipping in volume this week.

So KNC is shipping, my estimate of 245MM suddenly is to low?  ::)

That is so. Better make it around 320M once everyone who got their 570GH/s units shipped today, will receive them tomorrow and turn them on...

You are not considering that a lot of the orders where placed by international buyers and may not be able to be turned on before the next difficult increase.

Not a chance. It doesnt look like more than a few dozen of them will be turned on this week. The rest will only arrive next week and then we are so close to the next difficulty that even bringing online a petahash wont make much difference. Nah, this upcoming D change wont be significant. The next one is what Im looking forward to.

KnC video I watched showed their Jupiter running on cgminer with 19.6% hw error rate. Probably 20% plus with rejected. Don't believe all the marketing hype, still impressive though but no ROI.

At 570 GH/s...
I'm sure around 500 GH/s HW Error will be low. KnC didn't break their promises, their chips were able to do even a little more than they projected, which was good.

Bitcoin difficulty just hit 189,281,249, everyone please stop buying any more miner so I can break-even from my current one!!!

Mining is designed to protect the network, not make you profit.

Profit is designed to protect mining.  :)

I bet everyone is thinking the same thing as you do :P

Crazy.

When I recieved my order from BFL, the total hashrate at bitminter was on the order of 5.5 TH. Today? 82 TH. And if i'm reading this right, the difficulty back then was right around 26 million? All I can say is that I am glad I sold the moment it got here!

I'm guessing 215m is the next difficulty, even though I was completely off last time.. :)

242M is my guess.

Those KnCs dont seem to be making a dent yet.

Can you walk through the math you are so adamantly asserting is "possible" in volume?  You are claiming that you can get to 7.5 cents per GH/s?  Just give me a few numbers so I know that you are correct.

Wafer cost, chips per wafer, packaging, boards etc.   Power Supplies are more than per GH/s than your number all by themselves.   

$4000 per processed 300mm wafer, 177 candidates with hashfast die size (324mm²) that is $22.5 per candidate in silicon cost.
Subtract 15% yield, a few dollar per chip for packaging and testing and $30 is about right.

Note that $4000 was volume price at TSMC for 28nm over a year ago, its quite possible its cheaper now.


Im only talking about the asic. Feel free to make your own estimate of costs for the PCBs and PSUs. For reference, PCBs of highend videocards is on the order of $8, and those are very complex PCBs with up to 12 layers and very timing critical due to the highspeed ram etc.

Taking that back. Of course its hard to say how much of the current hashrate spike is statistical noise, how much KnC, Bitfury or any of the other players, but the game is on it seems:

Last 120   08/10/2013 20:47   262437-262557   279 863 848   x1.48
Last 10   09/10/2013 09:13   262547-262557   288 979 007   x1.53
Next   16/10/2013 15:48   264096   263 789 841   x1.39

If its not a statistical fluke, its bound to go up further considerably as KnC is no where near done shipping/deploying. Will we see 300M difficulty the next round? I think we may.

Man, yeah that's one hell of a jump!

Just saw this on reddit:
http://www.futureblock.com/

Lets you bet on the network hashrate increase. pretty neat idea, and afaict, well executed.
I just wish the criterion was the unambigious difficulty instead of a guestimated network hashrate

I believe alt coins will be feeling the heat as well when this happens.

Based on this website. Its much higher...

Current difficulty: 189,281,249
Next difficulty (estimate): 268,541,367

Its not the website thats so different, its just the time you are looking at it. Right now dot-bit predicts even more, 289M (x1.53)

But this estimate is based on a too short sample, simple luck / variance plays a very big role, so its too early to say we will really see such a jump. I wouldnt rule it out though, like I said 300M may be possible.

You are right, I looked at the same website and the estimate difficulty jumps to even higher.

Current difficulty: 189,281,249
Next difficulty (estimate): 288,762,149

Oh man, I do hope its much lower..

very high!!  :-\

Dropped back to where it was.
Maybe luck, maybe testing!

New guess is 231,000,000

Bitcoin difficulty

Time   Block   Difficulty   Ratio
Last change   06/10/2013 14:42   262080   189 281 249   x1.17
Last 120   09/10/2013 09:13   262546-262666   223 942 585   x1.18
Last 10   10/10/2013 01:27   262656-262666   475 183 053   x2.51
Next   18/10/2013 11:34   264096   223 259 328   x1.18

now this is going to be funny

http://bitcoindifficulty.com/

Current difficulty: 189,281,249
Next difficulty (estimate): 223,259,328

Sorry guys, but im not really good with maths. How come the difficulty swing so much up and down. I understand some people stop their mining at night and so on but this huge swing?

You can not measure the hashrate. All you can measure is how long it takes to find blocks, and from that estimate the hashrate (and future difficulty). Blocks finding is heavily subjected to luck, so you need a lot of blocks to get a reasonable estimate. Just have a look at these charts to get an idea:
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

Are you crazy or just bad at math and projections? Difficulty will be way above 240M at the next jump and probably also over 250M. This is a blatant certainty, you can bet on it.

Kludgey method: Difficulty can be roughly determined by hashpower at the mid-way point of the difficulty change window (7D in a stagnant mining network) IF it isn't an anomaly (that is, hashpower increase remains fairly linear). We're roughly 4.85 days in and if this were the halfway point, the difficulty could be projected @ 240M. 7/4.85=~1.4433 (estimated %increase from current point to 7D point). 1.4433*(240-189.28[<-Cur. diff.])= 73.204 (estimated difficulty increase).

Projected difficulty: 262.484M

ETA: Nope, all wrong. Forgot to factor in that this isn't a stagnant network, and diff change window <14D. Hrm. Without maffing it out, assuming 11.5D window... 5.75D ends up being the halfway point. 5.75/4.85=~1.185567. 1.185567*(240-189.28)=60.13195824.

Projected difficulty: ~249.412M. In reality, because hashpower increases exponentially, not linearly (right now), an adjusted projection would be ~251-253M. There's a lot of corner-cutting going on here, though. :D

223,439,792 in 8 days.

KnC is not shipping as fast as expected, so the next diff jump might not be that huge.

KnC has 1000 units left to ship = 500Th = 71mil diff till end of october = next jump 220mil, my guess

You think BFL stopped shipping all of their ~3000TH backlog ? Bitfury stopped shipping and expanding (~+100TH or so in their private mine alone this month so far)?
You sure asicminer will not deploy zero of the 500TH this month as friedcat claimed? Then there is the slim chance Hashfast would actually deliver on their promise.

We are already looking at 240-260M next week without any of the above. Good luck betting on 220 by the end of the month

HashFast  - already stated that in BEST case scenario shipping starts first week of november.

ASICminer - dont know

Bitfury - few TH

BFL :D - few TH (with they babies 5,25,50)

EDIT: im betting 220 for next jump not the end of the month!

220M would mean 1.57PH. Were are already at ~1.7PH and growing. Maybe if all those KnCs catch fire and we have a terrible streak of bad luck,  we could get down to 220.  But Im betting anything you want against that.

Of course this is random , and only for 10 blocks , but still..

"Last 10   10/10/2013 12:04   262741-262751   582 403 844   x3.08"

10 blocks is fairly meaningless, Ive seen it go anywhere from x0.3 to x5.

If you look at 120 blocks, there is still quite some variance, but at least the numbers mean something:
Last 120   09/10/2013 22:04   262631-262751   260 578 393   x1.38

If you add to that the upward trend, well 300 might get difficult, but 270-280M might still be possible.

Picking up some serious speed (or luck) now.

Last 120   10/10/2013 04:17   262680-262800   284 966 752   x1.51

Who knows, if this keeps up, that 300M may not be out of reach after all.

Starting at 300 million and having 50% increase per month gives me these estimates for next year:

2014 Jan  1.013 billion
2014 Feb  1.519 billion
2014 Mar  2.278 billion
2014 Apr  3.417 billion
2014 May  5.126 billion
2014 Jun  7.689 billion
2014 Jul 11.533 billion
2014 Aug 17.300 billion
2014 Sep 25.949 billion
2014 Oct 38.924 billion
2014 Nov 58.386 billion
2014 Dec 87.579 billion

90% is only likely for the next few months, but sustained for an entire year is simply too much. 50% starting now might be underestimating the immediate future, but seems likely is going to closely follow this pattern for several months.

So, it's a billion by January. Only profitable for the next generation of ASIC devices that cost below $3 per GH/s.

I predicted a slow down in increment instead. Reason cause the electricity cost is base on per GH/s.

Your estimates until April or May 2014 could very well be accurate, but the exponential growth can't go on forever and will have to level off at some point. I'd say we'll be around 60-70 PH/s in December 2014, that would be around 9 billion difficulty. That's around the point when the best ASICs on the market right now will no longer be able to mine more BTC than they cost in electricity.

Most of the ASIC buying has already been done. Now people are waiting for delivery.

Depends on what has been delivered and what will be delivered in the next 1.5-2 weeks.

My guess is 250ish, and next one will be 400 mil beginning of November.

 ;)

What numbers do you use to get that 60-70PH figure? Keep in mind electricity is dirt cheap in some places in the US, Russia and China and also keeping in mind performance projections of current 28nm asics are skewed towards performance per dollar, not so much power efficiency. As illustration, from bitmine.ch specs this:

Power usage of 0.35 W/GH in low power, 0.6 W/GH in nominal and 1 W/GH in Turbo mode


https://bitmine.ch/?page_id=863

IMO we will end up well above 100PH, possibly as much as 3-400PH at todays BTC exchange rate.

The point that exponential growth cant continue forever is of course valid, and its very difficult to predict how fast these companies will be able to produce and deploy. If BFL is taken as benchmark, it will take a few decades, but if you read that Hashfast has contracted  Ciara (https://hashfast.com/big-news-hashfast-signs-exclusive-deal-with-ciara-technologies/) and they are rumored to have the ability to crank out >1000 units per day (!), and keeping in mind Hashfast is just one of many, we may get their sooner than you'd think.

We are only halfway through this difficulty interval and already it points towards ~250M. KnC seems to have found a firmware solution for their machines, if they resume production and shipment, the next 6-7 days might add a fair bit on top that.

Also, Im quite sure the difficulty change after that, will still happen this month. I dont expect HF to ship anything before then, so I think we will end october around 350M, maybe a bit more if asicminer delivers. End of November, all bets are off.

You might be right also.

All that means is machines that have not shipped, that were ordered months ago, are not worth the money people spent on them.

Now, it's not all about ROI, at least for some people. I care about securing the network also, but I'd like to make a little on the side too. Heh.  ;D

The difficulty need to slow down, its going too fast..

lol. In all likelihood, its only going to speed up over the next ~6 months. The avalanche of 28nm products from countless vendors has barely even started.

Heating up quite a bit now.

Last 120   12/10/2013 10:45   263112-263232   300 944 020   x1.59
Last 10   12/10/2013 22:44   263222-263232   519 052 786   x2.74
Next   16/10/2013 17:54   264096   261 500 120   x1.38

Blockchain shows hashrate just a hair under 2PH

Looking like 2 months from now we will be looking back and remembering with fondness when total network hashrate was still in the single digit PHashes.

I remember getting upset over breaking 1M difficulty. Now it looks like we may hit 1 billion this year.

I know , that's why i stated it 's just for 10 blocks , but still amazing , just like this one:

Last 10   13/10/2013 10:02   263321-263331   921 076 639   x4.87

yeah just saw that one too. There was a time I was refreshing btc exchange pages all day, now Im refreshing hashrate pages all day. I need a life lol.

based on http://bitcoindifficulty.com/

Current Diffculty: 189,281,249
Next difficulty (estimate): 260,433,451

Looks like the increment is about 37% this time and that really sux. Looks like most miner ganna lose out.

I think should be +/- 45% to ensure as more asic in the network. The higher difficult it should be.


I think the next level should be 230M.

Let's just say there is too much craziness to predict.  ::)

Just use www.allchains.info - it has the most reliable method.

Currently predicts 243,000,000 for next adjustment.

, Both BFL and Bitfury have shipped hundreds of TH/s in the past month or so, not just a few TH/s, obviously KNCminer are shipping at least a PH/s in October, and more on the way in November.

Things are starting to get really ugly for the big expensive data center based farms. ASICminer are only about 2% of the nethash atm, if Hashfast ship on time the 1,000 diff in December is a reasonable guess.

I don't think the net hash growth is going to slow much before 5PH/s is reached, it's all one classic waste of electricity right at the time the climate doesn't need wasted energy.

Anyone worked out how many kWh per BTC? I guess the average power consumption would be over 2watt per GH/s atm. must work out to well over 500kWh per coin when you factor in dater center aircon.

You want to talk about a waste of electricity? Bitcoin mining is nothing lol, just a tiny drop in the ocean of wastefulness for the sake of our phoney economy.

RIght now hardware cost is still a far bigger cost than electricity, but given the nature of asics, that wont last very long.  At some point, the electricity cost to mine a bitcoin will pretty much equal its market value.  As long as it considerably cheaper to mine than buy, more people will join the network, its that simple.

Only about the output of a small nuclear power station, and increasing as the difficulty rises.

With efficiency 7w/gh/s whole network uses somewhere between 10 and 20 MW. And most of asics are more efficient than that. That's nowhere near small nuclear power plant

You are pulling energy figures out of the air, earlier this year they were talking about 650watt per GH/s with all the GPU miners.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-12/virtual-bitcoin-mining-is-a-real-world-environmental-disaster.html

However I look at it this way, we are currently mining about 5,000 coins per day, each one worth around $140 and people will keep adding gear until almost all that money goes in electricity/aircon bills. At 15c per kWh that's a lot of electricity.

Isnt it ?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_small_nuclear_reactor_designs

And its only going to get worse, much, much worse. CPU's, GPU's and FPGA's were inherently expensive because of their complexity and different target markets; that cost (to the miner)  limited overall hashrate to well below its electricity cost. Bitcoin asics are dirt cheap to produce, and have no value other than for mining, so in the long run, their price will come down to the point where its irrelevant and nearly all mining revenue will be spent on electricity.

Energy efficiency of these asics doesnt matter for the overall picture. More energy efficient designs would just lead to a much higher network hashrate, but at the same overall power consumption as a very inefficient (but comparably cheap to produce) asic.  Only electricity price and the bitcoin value (and perhaps transaction fees) will determine how much electricity the network will use. And its not gong to be very green, especially if bitcoin value rises to thousands or tens of thousands of dollars as some think.

Not impressed by it. Its now predicting 254M, and thats most likely still 10M lower than what it will be.
Dot-bit has been fairly consistently predicting around ~265M for some time now. It seems like allchains is using the old algorithm that dot-bit used and ditched:

"New used algorithm to estimate next difficulties is more accurate than traditional estimations, especially in cases of great difficulty change.
Old estimations are still available on the old difficulty page."

http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Their old algo gives the exact same result as allchains.

Like I said, it's nothing compared to other stuff. We consume over 140,000 TWh each year. Do you know how much power the entertainment industry consumes? Or the IT industry? Or gold mining besides the environmental damage it does? Even the minting/transport of our fiat currency costs more in power than bitcoin mining does. Do your homework please.

You do have to contrast it to the number of people it serves. Bitcoin is used by like 0.005% of the population and even then perhaps only 1% of the time compared to fiat.  Comparing that with gold or fiat is disingenuous. If bitcoin ever achieves anything close to the popularity of fiat or gold, its value will skyrocket and as a result, so will electricity consumption for mining as the two are linearly correlated.

So you are suggesting that crypto miners should do nothing about energy waste because other industries waste more? That's kind of pathetic really.

For starters it effects profits, and secondly there is nothing physical been produced.

What do you want them to do about it? GPUs are less energy efficient per $ than Asics are, and new Asics are only becoming more efficient because nobody wants to mine and pay a lot in electricity. I just think it's silly to complain about energy waste of bitcoin mining when it would actually save energy if gold and paper fiat currency were replaced by bitcoin.

More energy efficient designs will be slightly profitable while old models probably not anymore. Considering the same electricity cost of course

Stating that as fact doesnt make for one.

If only the US dollar would be replaced by bitcoin, how much would 1 bitcoin be worth?
Lets assume very conservatively there are only 10 trillion dollar. Divided by 21 million bitcoin gives ~$500K per btc.

So hypothetically, how much energy would be consumed by the bitcoin network once it would have stabilized? As much as it would earn in mining (see https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=297317.msg3338966#msg3338966)

Per year we would mine ~1.3M BTC or $657,000,000,000 worth of bitcoins.
Assume $0.15/KWH that works to  4,380,000,000,000 KWh or 4,380 TWh

Thats 5x more than the US produces in nuclear power. and almost exactly equals the total electricity production in the US (4,300 TWh). Funny coincidence.

Yeah, lets replace the dollar with bitcoin to save the environment

It doesn't matter, people will just buy more of the efficient units until any profit is absorbed again by the difficulty increases. What we need is a few mining farms to go bust and fold to show the rest of the miners that corporate mining farms are not a viable model, then perhaps a little bit of sanity will creep in. Thousands of home users mining with no air con or data center rental or wages to pay, can cope with high difficulty better than the corporate model.

Thats true for the individual miner, but the network doesnt care. Inefficient miners that are no longer operationally profitable will shut down, the resulting decrease in difficulty will enable the more efficient miners to add more hashrate profitably to the network. The net result is a higher hashrate, but the same energy consumption, assuming everyone pays the same price per KwH.

The only way to make energy consumption lower is if somehow the hardware would become much more expensive compared to the electricity they consume. That is still the case today, a KnC or HF machine costs way more in purchase than it will likely ever cost in electricity. But thats only for now, in the long run those asic prices will drop dramatically and as the network increasingly stabilizes, miners can invest longer term up to the point where writing off the hardware over 10 years (or whatever) is completely insignificant compared to their electricity bill, and the latter will determine profitability, and therefore equal mining revenue.

And how much time, energy and wealth do you think is wasted guarding banks, ATMs and gold reserves? Orders of magnitude more than it would take to secure the bitcoin network.

Those large figure would happen if you tried to peg the USD and BTC, that's not necessary. You only need enough currency to cover transactions for goods and services. People can use other currencies for gambling, investment etc. the production of USD has blown out of proportion because it's not just being used for transactions as originally intended, but as a speculative vehicle in it's own right. When the USD was pegged to the gold standard, there were far less USD in circulation, as soon as it unpegged things got rather silly.

To use crypto as a currency for goods and services you would do it in parallel to USD, like is happening atm, and gradually cut over, you wouldn't focus on exchange. BTC exchanges only account for about 3-4% of daily transactions.

The point being is that electricity priced in BTC may not be anything like electricity priced in USD because USD is so inflated that the utilities would have to rethink their pricing model.


Next difficulty is in 337 blocks, and it looks like going over 250mill.

Once again my prediction was too conservative.

LOL  :D go miners!

So guarding ATMs, banks and gold reserves consumes 10x more electricity than the US produces? Did you even read what you quoted?

Guards have salaries to be paid. They also need to sleep, go home, live their lives after their shifts. Arming them requires training, firearms, paperworks, documentation, accounting, offices, insurance, taxes, etc.

Miners just need a little bit of security, cooling, and electricity.

And securing the bitcoin network takes 10x more electricity than the US produces? You've pulled that out of your ass as well and I call bullshit on that one.

He said "orders of magnitude more" than bitcoin. I was gentle and went with 1 order of magnitude. Here is the math I pulled out of my ass to calculate power consumption of a bitcoin network that replaced the dollar:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=297317.msg3338903#msg3338903

You obviously don't comprehend what other people write very well, I understood what he was saying, it's was an extrapolation as to the energy consumption that would occur if Bitcoin was to replace USD and miners kept on adding gear as they do now until it was no longer profitable due to energy costs. It's not very hard to calculate if you know the final value of Bitcoin in terms of USD and the typical electricity price, not rocket science. Of course it 's unlikely to happen as banks wouldn't stand for it, but it does emphasize the absurd potential energy usage which is directly proportional to any rise in the BTC/USD exchange rate.


Next diff change in 249 blocks looks like it might be over 260mill.

that calculation is only viable for ~3 years. Than there will be only ~650k bitcoins per year mined (+ fees). And after another 3-4 years it will halve again. I maybe pessimistic, but I don't think bitcoin will reach something like $500k per coin in that time.

The block reward will halve, but just try to imagine transaction fees if bitcoin were as common as fiat is today.
Either way, even if we ignore tx fees and reward halving will cut down the number I came up with by a factor 8x in 2025, thats still a completely preposterous amount of electricity.

And what about inflation of electricity price? You think it will be still $0.15/kWH?

Also, banking sector is now using millions of human workforce, that doesn't count as energy? Every employee needs to heat his/her water, home, cook his/her meal... Bitcoin always comes out as cheaper energy wise, because it's cheaper money wise.

Clearly if electricity demand for bitcoin mining would rival 100% of all available electricity production, prices wont stay flat. But seriously, you couldnt possibly defend bitcoins energy consumption on the basis that it would consume so unbelievably much, that prices will skyrocket?


Right, so if bitcoin replaced fiat, we could... kill those people?

The banking sector doesn't cease to exist because a currency changes. It will still consume whatever it does.

I didn't mean electricity inflation because of bitcoin. Just plain and simple inflation as we've seen past 100 years. China uses more and more energy...

We wouldn't kill those people, they will do something more efficient than banking sector. Something which will have more added value with less consumed energy

267.731.249 just now.

Next? I'd guess ~500.000.000

Currently deployed hashrate is good for 350M (~2.5PH),
KnC is going to add another 500TH to that in the next few days, soon enough to count at 100%
Asicminer is supposed to bring 500TH online by the end of this month. NOt sure if that will be gradual and when it will start, lets count that for 25%
Bitfury and its resellers will likely continue to add at least another 100TH, as might BFL and others (avalon, btcgarden,..), Total say 250TH counted for 50% if deployed at a constant rate over the period

2500+500 +125+125= 3250 TH average hashrate for the next difficulty window (which  would end closer to 4000 TH)

=> 455M difficulty.

Low end didn't work for me.. So let's try something different.

My guess: 390M next difficulty

420mill next.

Between 355,413,233 to 468,529,685

Based on calculations from 32% increase to the extreme 75% increase.

That chart is misleading, the axis dont line up. Current network speed is ~2.5PH, which corresponds to a difficulty of 350M. To get to 450M the hashrate will have to increase by ~700TH on average over the period. If we assume linear deployement of that new hashrate, that means ~1.5 TH would need to be added to get to 450M. We may well exceed that, but its certainly not impossible we will stay below that.

Well, you seem to have deleted your post, so maybe you figured that out yourself :)

I am guessing another 40% increment which is 375 million. Because KNCminer still have another half to ship :)

We'll see a leveling at ~1.2-1.5 B difficulty around Dec/Jan according to my calculations.  Call me crazy, then check this post Jan/Feb against the charts.

And then the start on their November batch.

Yup, miners are losing badly.... really...

Heh I get it .. batshit crazy .. anyway, I mostly agree with this.  Anything from this to 1B in Jan in possible, depending on every factor in the book.

We will probably reach 1B difficulty by the end of November and if you think difficulty will level off in january I have a bridge to sell.
BFL may not have anything on 28nm by then, but they will eventually. Cointerra and coincraft will only just have gotten started, and I dont think KnC and Hashfast (not too mention Bitfury, next gen avalon, asicminer and other smaller players like btgarden, black arrow, activeminer,..) will have stopped.

Well if Bitcoin's price keeps rising, they could work out okay.

No they couldnt. The bitcoins they spent on the mining hardware will still be a loss. And dont give me that "but they paid in dollar" crap.
THe rising price is also inviting even more preorders, making the mid term prospects even worse.

Lastly, bitcoin is going up quite nicely, but hashrate is now growing by 4-5% per day. That means its currently quadrupling each month. And HF hasnt even begun.
NO way btc/$ is going to keep up with that.

For a taste of things to come:
Estimated Next Difficulty:   412,053,448 (+53.91%)

And that will likely prove to be an underestimation.

Im wodering how this will go... obviously Jan is 1500-2000 MM diff and very shortly by end of Q1 / 2014 weŕe at 5000 diff, but from that to 10.000 MM means again doubling the whole network from around 35THPH to 70THPH... how long this will take!?

Hard to say how long it will take, much will depend on how fast these companies can produce and ship, but its relatively straightforward to calculate roughly where it will end:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=295270.0

I was right for once on the guess..  :)

390,928,788

Yes, that was spot on! I guess your next estimate is pretty correct as well.

Though KnC have slowed down in their deployment and are ignoring their hosted customers, who should have had their units deployed after the 11th of October.

My guess is 530,000,000

530,000,000 to 680,000,000  (35% to 75% Increase)

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
Bitcoin Difficulty:   390,928,787
Estimated Next Difficulty:   546,924,561 (+39.90%)

Really does have an difficulty increment of 40% per 11 days. This is getting worst..

Bitcoin DIFFICULTY goes to Da Moon!

KnC should be done shipping batch 1, HF wont be ready for their first batch.
Im sure some KnC machines are still in transit, and difficulty still lags the network hashrate, but all in all, the next 2 difficulty adjustments will likely be rather modest compared to the months that will follow.

Yes, and quite a few hosted units that they just jumped over and have started producing yet.

BitFury is still doing major damage to the difficulty. I doubt the difficulty increases will slow down much this year. Knc will start shipping batch 2 in mid November.

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Bitcoin Difficulty:   390,928,787
Estimated Next Difficulty:   547,192,271 (+39.97%)
Adjust time:   After 1580 Blocks, About 9.5 days
Hashrate(?):   3,473,025 GH/s

I give up, the difficulty have been increase at about 40% for 3 consecutive time. You guys should be happy that I reduced the increment by 0.00001% :)

That site has been overestimating. Remember last round they were showing difficulty at way over 400 million and we are only at 390 million.

This site http://blockexplorer.com/q/estimate  estimates only 463 million. This number is always a little low and gradually rises throughout the round, but this time it has actually been dropping!

http://bitcoindifficulty.com/ only shows 432 million.

My guess is that difficulty will only be in high 400 millions, maybe 480 or 490 or so.

But their estimate is still close tho, just off by about 10 million which is few %.

Around 537,667,752 (+37.54%) / estimate http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty (http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty)

http://s8.postimg.org/95v2bmjp1/nextdif.jpg

Another big hike in-coming, didn't have any miner in hand :)

The difficulty is going out of control..

What you say!  I just spent five millions on asics!

Wohoo, you serious? I spent like 2k on GPU...

i was telling ppl to do that and not  to buy miners, cuz many ppl are preordered miners and they have yet to come

~600 million

i am expecting it too, somewhere around 600 milion

I think it'll settle between 485 and 490 this time around.
There are a few BlueFuries being shipped. On the other hand KnC seems to be done with their first deployment/shipment, so we have at least a 15 day long respite.

i wonder how long it will be till it levels off. year, 2 years, 3 years, never?

I believe the growth will slow down considerably somewhere next year. Newest generation ASICs use a 28nm feature size, which is only slightly behind the 22nm feature size of the latest generation of Intel CPUs. So while ASIC manufacturers have been able to use existing older technology relatively cheaply until now, if they want to improve much further, they'll hit the cutting edge where costs are massively higher and competition for production resources is greatly increased as well.

There is still room for improvement of current designs, but the steps will become less and less large.

What did you expect from an arms race?

Honestly that all depends on the demand for mining.

With ASICs in development it seems like the leveling off may be out a year or two. The next 9 months will pose very interesting.

I suspect there will be a lot of miners who buy hardware in the next 6 months that will be even more bitcoin poor (and fiat valuation, if that even means anything anymore) than miners that bought hardware 3-6 months ago, even if the order of magnitude of the hashing speeds between such units is 10 times...

Well it maybe an arms race HOWEVER it does take miners to make bitcoin move.  ;D So yes buying bitcoin is nice and all but with out a miner there is no bitcoin. :o

This! Plus, the more miners there are out there, the more secure the network is.

http://bitcoindifficulty.com/

Current difficulty: 390,928,788
Next difficulty (estimate): 462,272,138 (+18%)

I would invest in ASIC if the difficulty stabilized like this. Hope its not another 40%..

Unless the pools have had some amazing luck in the past ~24hrs, it looks like 1 TH just came online. Current estimate from bitcoincharts is 4500 TH.  Which is good for ~628 Diff. Hoping its just a fluke or just really great luck. Any news for large deployments or shipments in the past week?

That site is not very accurate.

Better estimate: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Oh no, another 40% hike, asic buyer ment to doom..

cuz you dont know how many ppl are expectinf their miners to come and start mining, i assume a lot of ppl

speculation speculations speculation. ....    just wait and see and mine as many BTC as you can until new diff yoump

Nope, more like 535M. Check out http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty as suggested by baritus. That site has been pretty accurate in previous difficulty predictions.

allchains.info gives the best info for difficulty changes.

Too many 8 and 9-minute blocks for a 50% jump.

More like a 26.7% jump, resulting in:

495,306,773

I'm putting my money on http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty.

Their track record speaks volumes :)

I agree its best predictor out there, but about that track record, assuming you refer to their charts, do keep in mind the difficulty axis is exponential.  Its a lot easier to achieve what appears like a straight line if the axis isnt linear :).

Of course, everyone would. And therein lies the problem no? If the difficulty stabilised like this, many more people would buy ASICS which would make the rate change, and go up much higher.

The good thing would be that at some point, added hashpower will only be a small add to the network.
Adding 1th a year ago would have been insta craziness, right now it is a drop on a hot stone.

With every increase, you need exactly that percentage more added to the former difficulty to increase further. It gets harder, but there will be some settlement soon ;)

Please define "soon", so we can quote it for posterity :)


Exactly. And the same effect works on price and price/difficulty. "I would buy some asics if only their price or profitability was more reasonable", and that too is a self defeating prophecy. Which is why we will see lower prices, but no improvement in mining profitability for the foreseeable future (which admittedly, is only a few months in this universe).

The "soon" depends on the daily added hashrate, the bitcoin price and so on.

Right now, to increase difficulty 100% you would need to add as much power as we have right now, approximately. Sure, that is possible, but then, to do that again, you again, need to double, which means you need to add four times the hashing power.

While I agree that we are getting very efficient, we will see some point where profits go to hell in all this mining business. If BTC China doesnt drive the price beyond $400, the profit margins will become smaller and smaller and the smarter equipment manufacturers will cash out and retire. And I believe this is the point I am talking about ;)

When will be next difficulty jump? Tomorrow

As mining profits dwindle, hardware prices will follow suit, until margins on hardware also become too small for vendors to bother with. That part I think basicaly everyone agrees with. Where the opinions differ rather dramatically is where this point will occur. You will find opinions ranging from 10 to 500+ PH at the current exchange rate. So, quantify it.

For the record, Im putting it somewhere between 100 and 250PH (at todays BTC rate), when growth will no longer be exponential (some % of the network per month), but will become linear (fixed amount of TH) and begin to slow down. The actual % may decrease next year, as I am not sure we will be able to maintain 3+% per day, but 1% or more will continue for quite some time IMO. Note that 1% per day is still a doubling every 2 months, and is still exponential.

I dont think it will go down not even mext year, cuz new ASICss will be aviable with more GHs. But be sure when the will go down the price will go too

I don't know who is nailing it, but i think this is the second time you guess it damn good. Grats! Waiting for the next one now.

I thought it'd be 520-530m 3 or 4 days ago, then 520m about 18 hours ago.  It looks like someone turned some stuff off.  haha.

I'm keeping track of how accurate each of the "guesses" is on the first post.

5*10^8

Actually, I have seen 4 Petahash before, now it is 3.2. If people are turning stuff off, they are turning A LOT off. I have no idea if this is profitable. But possibly, you could hash around 70-80% of the time and then switch off, just to delay the difficulty increase. Im not sure this works, though. Or is profitable.

Well, you gotta ship to your customers eventually.

In 5 years we may well be reminiscing about how you used to be able to buy your own personal miners, join a pool, and get your own bitcoins.

Eventually it must reach a point where the only people mining are the manufacturers. Only they can get miners at a cost that can squeeze out a microscopic profit.

Not likely anything is being switched off, its probably just variance. Remember, we cant measure actual network hashrate, we can only guess the hashrate based on how fast blocks are found, and in the short term thats obviously influenced by luck. If you would try to measure the network speed using 2 blocks, you could "measure" 100 exahash if it happens to be a quick block. Anything less than a few 100 blocks is meaningless and even 1000 blocks will show non trivial variance. Im sure someone will do the math for you (organofconti, are you reading?).

Another possibility is a more sinister one: someone is trying to attack the network, either by creating double spends or in a way recently described here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=325225.0

ghash.io was recently implicated in an alleged double spend attack against some betting site:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=321630.0

Not sure if there is a consensus on whether or not those allegations hold water, but it sounds plausible and just to be safe, this would be a good time to point your miner to a small pool if you are mining at ghash or one of the other "too big to fail" pools. Give bitminter a try, they are giving away a KnC Jupiter  (https://bitminter.com/mintrace)this month if you get lucky.

Here it is: 511m.


Crap :D

Next guess: 670m

My guess: Too early to say. In 1000 blocks, lets take guesses ;)

I always guess as soon as it changes, otherwise it's no fun. :P

621 867 645

 ;D

612M!!!

Dammm!

Bob Marley say: No women no cry...

Miners say: No mining no Cry!!

Seems like HashFast is nowhere near delivery (and are not even communicating), shile KnC finished their first batch and sill sait out a couple of weeks before sending out the next one.

This round may be quiet, so let's say an optimistic 590M. :)

To low, my guess 645M.

755,745,693
9.81 days left until 47.92% growth)

We haven't seen anything yet.

I think the next difficulty jump will be small compared to the one after that when Knc starts shipping November orders...  :o

Will we hit a difficulty of 1 billion before December 1st?

next estimate: 6 % up.

we are slowing down.

Definitively if 30%+ increases 3 times. Could be done if preorders keep delivering

But I guess Dec 14 is safe bet for 1 billion difficulty

I'm pulling for 615m ~20% increase and should be around there for the next few increases until 1b, then maybe slow to 10-15% growth imo.

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
Bitcoin Difficulty:   510,929,738
Estimated Next Difficulty:   652,003,109 (+27.61%)

I am guessing about 50% increase in difficulty cause hashfast is getting ready to ship their ASIC.....

Hashfast isn't getting ready for anything at this moment!

At current prices of close to $400, my BFL single is profitable up until 24 billion difficulty, and we're only up to 510 million. Can someone wake me when we reach 24 billion?

My guess on next difficulty is between 560-610m. I prefer the allchains.info method of calculation. It is based on how fast and how much we have completed of the next 2016 blocks since last cycle. Currently at ~30% measured we are at a 2% increase. This will gradually increase next week if more miners are turned on, probably end up at 10-15%, could be lower though. As we approach 75% or more completion it becomes clear what the next difficulty will be.

You guys haven't been using those silly mining and difficulty calculators have you? The only accurate calculators are the ones that tell you how much you will mine at current difficulty.

If people are turning off miners, I would be glad to turn it back on for them. WTB another miner.

They are accurate for about 5-6 days on average.  If your investment horizon is that short, by all means use them.
After those 6 days, they are far more inaccurate than all the ones that predict eternal exponential growth.

I use the calculator to tell me what I can mine currently and makeup my own predictions past that. There are too many variables to take in that those difficulty calculators don't. They don't come to the forums to see who's getting new miners next week, the gaps in delivery of miners, or using the pics thread to gauge other average miner's operations and how they increase over time. From experience, the next cycle and probably the one after will be a rather small increase. I usually make a mental best and worst case prediction about what will happen over the next 1-3 months. It's hard to predict further than that because you don't know what will and can happen.

800 mil i am expecting

i am expecting right around this number too.

it is getting very, very difficult for newcomers of bitcoin to get into the mining action.
i think mining is where you learn the majority of what you need tdo know about btc and if people aren't offered this... i worry about the future of btc.

plenty of diff reducing blocks for the first couple days.  rising since then to +33%.  about 7 or 8 days to go.  So, the subconcious says .......


21% rise next diff, resulting in 618,224,682

Except just now when I checked the present diff for the math, it was showing 11+ minute blocks, so I'm changing the next difficulty to .....

597,490,873

Two guesses for the price of one.

EDIT:  Got fooled by a page cache.  I"m disavowing my second guess.

i dont worry about future BTC, only thing what ASIC developer must do is to lower the prices od their ASICS or invent some new ASICS with more GHs at the same price

My estimate was not that far off and  better than OP's: 609.482.679 :)
Next, well, with KnC's upgrade modules in the wild, it'll be steeper this round.
Maybe 750M?

Props to aggrophobia:  612M guess on 11/5.

MAybe but dont be so optimistic

it is 609,482,680

http://www.vnbitcoin.org/bitcoincharts.php

I'm thinkin 715m or about 17% increase.

766M

Remember, mining is more than half over. More than half of the potential Bitcoins have already been mined. It's all uphill from here. Mining is not how you get into Bitcoin unless you have access to a wafer fab.

for someone who has time and not big expectations, if it stays by 1,000,000,000 difficulty someone with 300ghs can still earn 0.15BTC per day and if the price goes up, that's a little wealth after some time.

699

I feel like making a guess. As with many others it's based on no research, but simply a feeling.
670M

741M

Gamma ray burst has brought me next difficulty:  14.4% jump = 697,476,961.

next difficulty jump will be on Saturday?!

next one after this next jump will surely be 900+  if KNC manages to deliver their whole november batch in time to get set up during the next diff, will also be the first diff when BFL are no longer mass shipping their backlogs I guess, let's see how much (if any) effect that has on the jumps  ::)

Estimated Next Difficulty: 705,497,350 (+15.75%)
Adjust time: After 56 Blocks, About 7.8 hours
http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

707,408,283.05 is the new difficulty.

Who gets a milliSatoshi as a prize?

Come to think of it, a milliSatoshi now is worth a chunk of change... ;D ;D

Thomas H Rev89 wins with 699M

a milliSatoshi is 10/trillionths of a BTC, not enough to buy Josh Zerlan's reputation.

next gonna be 777

I'm estimating 830. KNC should be releasing all their batch 2 by then.

895

862,862,862

911,111,1111

920.000.000

899,000,000

next will be 980

I'm guessing 1.1 billion.

1.15

1.05

Get your good guesses on!

1.05 *shudders*

1.27

1.18

1,02B

1.3

I'm guessing 1.25 billion for new difficulty
 >:(

He-he pessimistic, are we?  ;D And rightly so. There are still a few more KnC units to come on-line, not to speak of all the other stuff...

Do not confuse pessimism with realism  ;D

Not so much other stuff shipping that Im aware off. Next adjustment will be in ~10 days, HF wont have shipped a lot, if anything by then, CT most likely nothing either, or at least not enough and not early enough to make much difference;  BFL has caught up with their backorders (and who in their right mind is ordering 65nm gear at those prices today), asicminer is sold out I believe, which leaves only a few small players like Bitmain and maybe some Bitfury gear?

Next 10 days will be the calm before the storm.

I think the rest of December will actually be quite favorable for miners as far as difficulty increases are concerned. The hashrate still needs to catch up to the November Knc batch, so that will impact the next difficulty increase.

After that it doesn't seem like there are any large miner deliveries due in December and the pre-order delivery delays are piling up.

Ok, sorry if this has been asked a ton before...but what is a ballpark Difficulty estimate for May???

1,098,765,432

Seems only 1.1 - 1.15
Not much time for new stuff to make difference

Between 10-15 billion if the difficulty continue to increase at this pace.

my saturn and redhash, 2 months ago, were chugging along at such an awesome pace... now i'm scared my babies are becoming worthless.  kind of hope the difficulty stabilizes a bit soon.

Wow, so at 15b, a Neptune will barley be making 3BTC per/mo...

Hopefully that's worst case... ???

I would actually consider Neptune shipping in May a best case scenario. Given all the uncertainties regarding 20nm production, I wouldnt be surprised if it shipped closer to July.

Neptunes better ship in May.  I feel like I just got my Jupiter and within a few months they'll be "meh".

:S

At 1 Watt per GH/s that is about 60-100 Megawatts of electricity powering mining hardware. The output of a small power plant.

Didn't you hear, BFL will be blowing out Monarchs left and right come March



















2015

1.38B next guess :)

Holy hell, 1.38B...
This is not what I was expecting at all.  My own personal hashrate estimation charts are off big time.  Time to re-think my plans...

1.48B
Who will give more ;)

I don't get something though, where are the recent shipments coming from?
Strange...

There are shipments from China

Is my math right? I am not accepting the difficulty growth rate of 30% steps.
Difficulty doesn't grow like bacteria, right? I don't think Moore's law is useful for the next 3 months.
Genesis block says Jan difficulty will go from from 1.5b to 3b (default values).  Understandable.  But does Feb go from 3b to 6b? And March from 6b to 12b? 
I know there's a lot of hash hitting the market Q1(maybe?), my question is, reversing the logic and if the math stays consistent, is a rise of difficulty from 1.5b to 12b in 3 months realistic?  That's the rough equivalent of ending march with a network hash rate 10x faster than our current rate(10Ph/s to almost 100Ph/s).  Is it technologically possible to have the network hashrate increase by 8 Petahash every 11 days for the next 3 months?  Without considering under-discussed factors like equipment breakage/obsolescence, vaporware, elec$ and  btc$, and even if all equip shipped Jan 1, that's the equivalent of over 2500 KNC Neptunes every 2 weeks. Using round figures, that's almost 70,000 1Th/s miners shipped in 3 months (almost 800 a day!).  I don't see that happening. KNC only made 1200 first round neptunes ( i know they are 3+Th/s), but I doubt the rest of the asic market is making up the additional hash, so doesn't the difficulty curve has to taper? Or is my logic flawed?

You are right its not like bacteria and it wont continue doubling forever. But do consider this; during the previous difficulty interval, over 3PH was added in 10 days, during a time "no one" was shipping or deploying high performance miners. Well, clearly, someone must have, but it wasnt KnC, nor HF, CT, Bitmine, AM, BA or BFL. Unless it was some dark horse in this race, that was the result of smaller vendors like Bitmain or some bitfury resellers. If they can deliver 300TH per day, just how much do you think all the companies i just mentioned combined can ship/deploy once they are going in full production ?

FWIW, Josh from BFL is on record saying his company will easily be able to assemble and ship over 1000 Monarchs per day. Thats over 10PH per month. And thats only a single company. Next year we will have over 10 companies shipping latest generation miners. At least one of which is using a seriously large factory to assemble their units:
https://hashfast.com/pictures-of-the-ciara-assembly-floor/

576500 Square feet. Makes BFL look like a garage shop really.

That's Ciara assembly , and it won't be working 24/7 for hashfast.
Actually , they will assemble their products in less than 24h on one line.

But at one point , you can't get more double the Hashpower each month.
It's pretty easy right now , ship 3000 Neptunes or equivalent , next month add 6000 , but in 12 month we will have to add 6 millions of those to keep up.

Which is the point. I just dont see a significant bottleneck anywhere.  Assembly cant be a (long term) bottleneck, if you consider the industry assembles roughly 1 million PC's per day and since this number is taking a nose dive, all these assembly houses are desperate for new business.

Chip production is not a bottleneck either. One single 28nm wafer holds enough chip candidates for somewhere around 50 - 100 TH. TSMC alone processes tens of thousands of such wafers per day, and they too are desperate for new production volume as they are operating well under 70% of their capacity.

The only thing really holding production back is probably a combination of strategic planning (its better to sell miners further in the future as their ROI is less predictable then) and risk adverseness of asic vendors, who are not ordering more than they can afford to lose, in case their chip doesnt work, bitcoin takes a nosedive, some competitor produces so much it destroys the value of their product,  or whatever.  


In 12 months growth will have tapered off. It wont even take that long. Not because I think production would be a problem, but simply because mining would no longer be economically feasible unless bitcon price goes x10 or more again. At this point however, I dont think anyone really loses sleep whether difficulty will be 500B or 5T next Christmas.  What really matters is the next 3 or 4 months.

I'm talking about which companies. It is clear the Fabs are in China.
It just seems strange that the large companies are not shipping right now (that I have heard) and the difficulty is still rising.

So, which companies are and have been shipping lately?

Actually, most of the fabs are not. TSMC is in Taiwan, Globalfoundries is in Germany. China also has smaller fabs, but no 28nm that Im aware off. The reference to CHina was most likely in relation to some smaller chinese players, like Bitmain, and wasnt BTCgarden supposed to be deploying around now?

But I doubt they are responsible for the increase. Its most likely bitfury based gear. Could be private mines (cloudhashing and the like), could be bitfury themselves. Technobit is also still shipping, on their site I see 1100+ bitfury based boards in stock and avalon gear as well.

Could the manufactures be putting their own new product online before selling to the public. Miners are the most profitable when they are first put online from my understanding. Why wouldn't the manufactures put the first few hundred online themselves before selling them to get the max ROE. You would call it testing and it would let you test and also grab the max profit by getting the big gh advantage for a time.

They most certainly are, call it a 2 week burn in.

Looks like it'll be close to 1.38 :)

Certain ASIC maker, with flying insect name, mines for a year before shipping out the miners to rightful owners. Allegedly.

1.65B Next Guess.

Well 4 PH added suddenly and more to come who knows maybe higher? I think I can by happy that I can roi with 800 ghz in march but who knows maybe I can get a few more bitcoins.

I say 1.85B.

Unless it counts the avg then its diffrent.

Have to correct myself on that.
That's Ciara assembly , and it hasn't worked a minute for HF. =))))

You hit the spot  :)
Fake is fake. They took the money and ran.

1.65B seems about right.
I don't foresee any 30% increments in the next few months, but a steady climb for the next half year.  Then I think we see everything settle down as BTC climbs back into profitability for miners.

I heard as a buyer from some big miners that soon there will be a lot more power added to the
network, feb-march . we are talking about 500-1000 Th each  .  :o
Went to their house and saw it with my own eyes .
Btw,we are in asia .

omehenk  ;D

Guestimate..So what should be the first +1TH miners shipped, and when? Cointerra, HashFast, Bitmine, Black Arrow ???

Hashfast?
Probably in 2114.

Haha, yeah I probably wont see my batch 1 Neptune till Obama is out of office..

:)

i say 1.70  ;)

Next difficulty 2,356,198,387 (+31.66%):o

the increase is insane for the past few weeks.

Now bitcoinwisdom is saying it's only going up by about 29.6% in 7 days, that's about 2% less than was estimated yesterday, maybe a lot of smaller miners will start to pull the plug and head towards other altcoins.

I think some asic company could have pulled the plug on their miners and started shipping to customers.

Cool !

I was a little surprised by the new difficulty too. I thought it would be higher.

Bitmaintech (Antminer hardware/manufacturer) has a post that got me thinking (dangerous).  It broke down the risk/reward of btc mining from the "big" miners' point of view.  R&D, labor hours, hardware investments, power costs, infrastructure costs, and after all of that, what's left?  Bitmaintech estimates percentages in the teens.  At what risk?  If btc price goes down, no profits, but losses.

I know everyone says don't buy any miner now as it will never make the return on investment, but the big players are also in the same predicament as the hobby miners.  Sure, the manufacturers are going to keep producing faster and faster miners, but the jig is up.  Hardware vendors now have to deliver or no one's buying their BS anymore.  Lower prices for better hardware same thing that happened with PC's/laptops.  And how many new miners will be coming in when they are intimidated by the message "the difficulty is so high" and diminishing returns...

So maybe the difficulty will stop shooting up...  Unless, of course, the btc price shoots up again.

I'm mining as a hobby.  Learning to tinker with specialized hardware and software.  It's a lot of fun for a tech-nerd like me.  Maybe I get my roi, also.

Bitcoin Difficulty: 2,193,847,870
Estimated Next Difficulty: 2,609,566,119 (+18.95%)
Adjust time: After 1535 Blocks, About 9.8 days

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Let's see how accurate this estimation will be.  ;D

Keep growing exponetially :D

Bitcoin Difficulty: 2,193,847,870
Estimated Next Difficulty: 2,597,587,410 (+18.40%)
Adjust time: After 1364 Blocks, About 8.6 days

The estimated next difficulity is becoming lower and lower.  :D

Shhhh, quiet, you're going to jinx it.  ;)

Just a reminder, all the sites that estimate the next difficulty are really inaccurate for days after a difficulty increase. about 4 days (or less) before the next increase they are pretty good.

I'm guessing 3B diff for next.

3,191,424,356 (+21.74%)
Adjust time:    After 1906 Blocks, About 12.3 days

This is what bitcoinwisdom is saying right now... no more ROI on many of the miners out there except the biggest.

Time to sell all the mining hardware to the ignorant many (like me) for vastly over priced £££ on ebay. Shame, the human race is self destructive in its greed

Not sure this is greed. If one can make more by merely buying btc's than how can you call someone taking a huge chance on a miner Greedy? If anything it is a huge gamble but rather appears to be both a hobby and reinvestment, not to mention a way to get btc's in some tough countries.

I am just sad to see there are always newbies buying overpriced hardware with no idea they can never get their investment back...not enough close....

Funny, ever since I started buying mining hardware in May, I have seen people make this statement. And yet, I've made US$5000 over my US$15,000 investment. I'm glad that people are saddened that people buy hardware, otherwise there would be that many more people pushing the difficulty up.

Not bad.  It will probably be +520M (20%) to 780M (30%) so 3.2B to 3.4B.

It is amazing nevertheless.  Soon all home heating will be done with bitcoin mining rigs :-)

So in 5 months...

3,000,000,000 / 145,000,000 = 20.68965 <---- rough calc.

Difficulty went up more than 20 times.

 :o

It turns out to be 3,129,573,175 (19.39% increase)

Nice. I expect next difficulty to cross 4B

I wonder when the price will follow ? And what is the role of mtgox "problems" in that ?

Price won't follow because btc mining is currently too profitable. Mining profitability always trends towards barely profitable. Right now an antminer cost me .65 cents/day in electric and makes a lil over $20/day. Even after I expect ROI, it will still probably make ~$10/day and cost the same.

Most likely we will eventually reach a point that is similar to the profitability that gpu rigs were getting right before asic's arrived. I've noticed a low term trend of everyone expecting a ROI on whatever hardware within 3-6 months. If it falls below 1 month to ROI, you see everyone flourish to buy hardware, over 5 months or so and people stop buying.

And who is to say you should make money btc mining anyway? Satoshi never said he created bitcoin so home users can get rich mining. Why do so many users expect profit? They talk as if bitcoin owes them, when it's them that owes bitcoin.

I actually look forward to the day when the home user no longer makes money mining bitcoin because that's not why it was made.

3.75B next?

Doing a simple calculation for 70% increase monthly, by Jan 2015 will be 746,000,000,000  a 240x increase from 3.1B now in 10 months.

A 3TH KNC Neptune (thats not even out yet) will lose $10 a day by then.    @3000watts .16kwh cents electrity

Doing another simple calc,
746,000,000,000 diff is in hashrate  5,500,000 TH ?
About 1,800,000 Neptunes?
1,800,000 * 3kwh * 24h * $0.16 = $20,000,000 per day for electricity.
Some really efficient chips must arrive, or bitcoin at $6000.

People thought it was crazy when the network hashing power was more powerful than the worlds top 500 supercomputers combined..

Just saying its crazy the difficulty level jumps.  And there are other bigger players than knc retail Neptunes. Probably most of the machines are hidden from public knowledge. 

Watch by july and see if there is any r.o.i. in mining left.

Start the difficulty at 3.7 tomorrow And 70% monthly compounded rise.

;) If there will be no +ROI in mining left by July, will hashrate continue to grow 70% monthy?

Mostly used by the manufacturers and their partners.  But with ever  diminishing returns.

In order for ROI to continue one of two things if not both need to happen:

1. Better hardware with more speed and less power requirements.

2. Price rise in Bitcoin.

Once that happens everyone will have 1 TH/s minimum hashrate the difficulty will be in 10 to 100 Billion by that time. Then the company will make even more efficient miner which will lead to more "outdated" miners on the second hand market. There will a limitation of developing the most efficient miners by the end of this year for next year.

Profit is high but the difficulty keeps on rising, ALWAYS rising. Meaning each person will earn less and less coins every 2 weeks.

Bitcoin Difficulty: 3,815,723,799
Estimated Next Difficulty: 4,588,873,284 (+20.26%)
Adjust time: After 1828 Blocks, About 12.1 days

Still a long way to go but so far this is the smallest increase in network hashrate that I have seen in a while...when the diff went to 3.8 on Feb 28 hashrate was 27.3.  Right now it's 28.8 and block generation is at 9.6 minutes...it usually goes down to 9 minutes almost right away.

I noticed that also. Very strange I think we have a long way to go yet before we lvl off this could just be to soon to tell in this 12 day cycle. But it is very interesting if we se a bit of a trend change.

OMG! After this I think buying new hardware is going to be worthless

It looks like we are going to have a very small increase this time :)

I'm going for the 4 in my guess. :D

Even 10% increase ATM is big increase. 300kk+ increase is not very small :)

I think it is just interesting that the expansion may not be exponential as predicted. Still a huge jump but may change things as all the btc profit calculators go on 20% to 30% every 12 days forever.

And it's only first week of March. Some people were predicting it will go like this until summer at least. I can't wait to see the next 3-4 jumps, but i think that the big jumps aren't over yet. I assume we will see some big jumps between May and end of June and after that it will cool off.

I agree it seems to soon to be slowing down but wouldn't we all love to be wrong.

Very true  :D

BTW, it seems the hashrate is going back up...

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-small-lin-2k.png

And the famed Neptunes aren't on the horizon yet

lol. Guess I said it too soon. ;D