Bitcoin Forum

And now for my latest butt-snaffled prediction...

The last 10 Million bitcoins will be at least 90% mined by Chinese (mainly students) using high end GPUs that cost them about 1/4 of what the rest of the world pays for them.


I guess I have to wait til about 2013 to see if this prediction starts to look like it's on track.. but by 2030 you'll all see how right I am. Just you wait!!

I suspect the Indians will go for a late run to grab a decent slice of the last 3 million,
and the African continent will go for a quick jog in 2032 to snap up some scraps of the last million.
(Some parts of Africa managed to skip some of the shoddier mobile technology and jump straight to the good stuff - with any luck they'll skip to some decent GPUs and seriously jump in to the fray a lot earlier than I predict. You know those Nigerian guys at least are hungry for it!)

if we're talking about after 2013, I'd predict it'd be specialized chips, no-one using GPUs anymore.

Agreed.

When I saw the title of this thread I thought it was about traditional mining. I guess I forgot I was in the Bitcoin forum ::)

oh yeah.. but of course I meant.. Gigahash Processing Units   
at least until they get Googolhash Processing Units :P

I have to wonder if electricity costs will ruin your calculations. A common report coming from China
is an electricity shortage. The prices, while low compared to us right now, are only going to go up.
So unless your hypothetical students get free electricity I can only imagine that many countries
which are cheap now will go up and perhaps be more expensive then the US based on average
household earnings in the next few years.

So cheap hardware, while an advantage, might not be a big enough offset compared to power and cooling?

Most students in the US have free electricity in the dorms.  I have no idea about China though.

I'm counting on it being difficult to police.. and easy enough to put a few BTC or RMB into the hands of the local officials (some of this money heading right up the chain to the hands of bigwigs in the party)
If the result on the local level is an inflow of money - the Chinese will find a way to make it happen!

Ummmm guys,

There is now way in hell for the government here to do anything about bitcoin. VPNs are incredibly cheap here and readily available.

Under Chinese law trading in bitcoins is highly illegal but mining them is not in anyway illegal.

Hardware prices here aren't that great either compared with the US or EU, but there are older models available at reasonable prices. On Taobao 5850 Saphire Extreme= 1020RMB= 158.407 USD this is not really that great a price especially considering that 5 in 10 cards are refurbished ones that will NOT clock. ATI 6990s on Newegg China 5899RMB= 916.122 USD http://www.newegg.com.cn/Product/A19-09K-2CN.htm (http://www.newegg.com.cn/Product/A19-09K-2CN.htm)

You can however get really oldish stuff like 5750-70 at relatively low prices around 490-600RMB = 76.0976 USD and up a bit.

The main advantage here is power costs and at the moment it would be politically unacceptable for them to rise if you're outside the top 3-4 cities power comes down to around 5-6cents a KWH.

means they'll mine and sell as fast as possible, because they cant trade normally, only sell to get Fiat Money... (and will weaken the bears?)

You're mostly right, but I predict that our gov won't take any action toward bitcoin in next 2~3years at least, probably 6 years. Later one is how much time it took our gov take some not so serious regulation on the virtual currency like QQ coin, issued by Tencent.

Good call from OP, and first reply. These old threads have some gems.

This whole chinese banning bitcoin is sucha  hoax.

They may not accept it, but i know friends in china been buying bitcoin in other ways since they promote it on their t.v station at one point.

And they re-open it again and they go back closing and repeat.

First reply called it perfectly.  GPU mining lol.

The biggest gem is it was a heck of a speculation on moving to China.  Cheap power has turned some regions into powerhouses of mining.

Most don't mess with GPU these days.  But some of these big data centers are doing great with Asics.

I love the fact that the Chinese government was warning their people of the financial risks of Bitcoin investment when the government was responsible for crashing it.

I think their main worry was the rumblings of commerce starting to accept it. They put a stop to that pretty rapidly. Now it's borderline useless there for anything other than speculation they'll probably leave it be for now.

the guys predicted quite accurately, chinese mining boom had come and will continue for a loooong time.