Bitcoin Forum

Preample
Basically, this thread is a continuation of DeathAndTexas's thread using the scheduled/expected delivery date of all main ASIC players to assemble a somewhat valid forecast of total network hashrate. Personally, I think this is the most appropiate way to do it and I highly appreciate his work. I will also copy the basic design of his thread - it is in good shape and people involved earlier will recognize it fast. I was hoping he would continue updating his thread on a regular basis - this said, I have no intention in stealing anyones idea - I am just interested in a valid hashrate forecast. Mr DeathAndTexas - in case I spit in your soup here - feel free to drop me a PM. Link to original thread -> Original thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820.0)

Goal
Produce a hashrate forecast Q1 2014 (31.03) and Q2 2014 (30.06) based on the delivery schedule of main ASIC companies (and other sources!?) for that timeframe by using community knowledge. Starting point is 01.01.2014 with a hashrate of 11 Ph.

Method
A) In case you have an indication/ wild speculation/ backed up source of how much Thash will be released by a specific entity post your estimate in the following format:


B) Any estimate is welcome. In case you want to contradict a statement please behave mannerful and explain why your estimate differs
C) Always try to include a source and a statement about your scenario assumptions 1) Lower tier, 2) Mid tier, 3) Upper tier
D) This thread is not to discuss any specific products in terms of ROI. Whether Miner xyz will break even is offtopic and will be deleted
E) Any post containing unrespectful behavior or other offtopic discussions will be deleted
F) Before posting check out the scam list first! -> Good effort! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=366659.0[/url)
G) I am open for any feedback or ideas how to improve our forecast approach. Don't post it here. Leave me a PM.
H) No one can predict the future. Let's try to generate a realistic case. In the end we will most probably have a range of xxx-xxx Thash.

Total Hashrate Forecast Q2 2014
Based on delivery by end of Q2 2014:


Conclusion, Chances & Sensitivities (Preliminary)
Rather than just posting a number I prefer to lead the discussion based on a range or tier system. For the first draft of this conclusion I introduce the lower, mid and upper tier.

Lower tier:

Upper tier:

http://i.imm.io/1naAH.png

Mid tier:

First draft - Feel free to discuss this openly with your insights! Still have the gut feeling our Mid tier is too high. I expected something around 7b diff earlier.

Version
- 27.12.2013; start of discussion
- 30.12.2013; first rough draft; removed Q1 FC; set focus to Q2 FC; renamed scenarios to "Lower, Mid, Upper"; draw first conclusion
- 07.01.2013; Hashfast failed to provide, but for now -until clarifiaction of situation - lets keep FC like it is; Some unknown source keeps adding massive hashpower; We have to observe that trend; Next review around end of January; By then, we will have a lot more information for Asicminer, Bitmine, Hashfast, Cointerra etc...

Next Step/ To dos until 07-09.02.2014
- Check batch definition of each vendor - I am not 100% sure whether I did mistakes  (by: Community)
- Check & discuss lower/ mid/ upper figures (by: Community)
- Ongoing search for every tiny bit of information (from mails, forum, vendor hp, IRC, media) to verify our data (by: Community)
- Update tiers & conclusion including aboves findings (by: author)

Sources for forecast data
[1]    https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-69
[2]    https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-72
[3]    https://www.kncminer.com/categories/miners
[4]    https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-73 -> Batch size is pure speculation. Any ideas?
[5]    Statement Friedcat in Asicminer thread on bitcoin.org -> Someone has the link?
[6]    550 Units@ 400-600 -> HF Order Chain information; Speed still not verified
[7]    max. 400% of BJ speed-> Hashfast ToS

[8]    No figure available; Is currently selling batch 4, which is guaranteed to ship by March 31, 2014; Once product is debugged    additional batches will follow for sure

[9]   http://www.coindesk.com/cointerra-cuts-price-of-terraminer-iv-bitcoin-mining-rig/ -> The 2 Ph is Dec and Jan batch???
[10]   No figure availabe; following batch 1; CT is currently selling batch 5; Cointerra has without a doubt massive capacities; any ideas?
[11]   http://www.coindesk.com/bitmine-to-drop-4phs-of-asic-power-onto-bitcoin-network-before-april/

[12]   Pure speculation on basis of production capacity; I read they have capacity of around 50 rigs/ day, 20 working days, 2 TH biggest unit = 2 Ph/ month

[13]   Pure speculation; No one knows right now. Josh claims capacity of 1000/ day, 20 working days, 600 Gh unit = 12 Ph/ month; From the past - Company has reputation of beeing late and overstating its capability. Nevertheless, they already deployed substantial hashing power & future potential should not be underestimated

[14]   http://ecointalk.net/topic/11-prepaying-full-or-50/?p=17
[15]   Any information??? Which batch is selling right now? How many units?
[16]   Cumulation of smaller vendors; hidden Island operations; Start-ups whatever; safety margin
[17]   Broken gear; numbers wild speculation



Let's do this.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update 11.02.2014

Finally I found some time to scramble the numbers. We got a lot of new information and developments. I try to cover them all. In case I miss something crucial feel free to give me the hint. In addition - before I start with this - at some point I will surely drop negative/ positive remarks about vendor x or y. This is not to attack/ promote the operation or the people behind it. This is simply the attempt to transfer their behaviour into some viable numbers. Fans of club A or B. Please do not feel judged - try to see this in the right light: We want a solid FC here!

Let's start. First - I want to check what happened between our starting point 01.01.2014 (11 PH) and the last adjustment on 05.02.2014 (18.7 PH). In this period roughly +8/9 PH got added to the network. Our initial guess of 10 PH per month up until July was surprisingly accurate for the first month. We all can agree that no major player in our spreadsheet shipped significant amounts. We saw some Hashfast/ Cointerra units in the wild but major consensus is that they have not started mass production yet.

Conclusion: All added network power originates from the position "Others" in our spreadsheet. Who are the players in here? We hear a few names. Most prominent should be Avalon chips (6 PHs sold), Bitfury, Antminer, 21e something... and maybe a few other hidden projects. Bad news is we have no deeper insights on the developments here. Good news is we dont need all the details to adjust our FC accordingly. It should be clear by now that my initial number of "Others" was WAY, WAY, WAAAAY to low. Given around 8 PH originates from "Others" in January I set FC to approx. 5-10 PH per month from now on only for this position. [1]

Let’s check step by step what our main spreadsheet positions are doing. From top to bottom.

KnC:
Will not deliver any additional Jupiters. Maybe a small batch of upgrade modules which will not have significant effects on the hashrate. They started to build an arctic mega-datacenter on the dark side of the Neptune to cover potential losses for their 20nm customers and move towards cloud based mining in the future. Nevertheless, they claim to have made significant progress on their development. I will only remove the Jupiter position in the spreadsheet and - for now - leave the "Neptune-Batch" position untouched. My feeling is, they either provide the physical Neptune in Q2 (unlikely) or the equivalent in virtual hashpower (more likely). Anyway, this does not impact our FC. I know there are people out there with different opinions about what KnC will do or not do. Still open for discussion here. [2]  

Asicminer:
The quote of 2 to 20 PH for the initial batch of their new chip is still up to date BUT - they also announced to delay their tape-out to mid Feb. I am not an engineer - but my understanding here is: From tapeout to working chip around 60 days (mid April). Then they have to sell their chips, ship it, people need to start developing miners based on their chips and so on..... From observing their thread I also have the strong feeling their management lacks basic customer/ shareholder care, fast decision making and clear strategy. For me these are strong indicators for a delay. Although their chip looks very potent on paper - I just dont see any significant volume from AM in our observed timeframe. This said, AM FC is reduced significantly. [3]

Hashfast:
I guess not much to say here. They messed it up big time. As far as I followed the 1m+ pages in their tread they managed to ship their initial batch without MPP. Don't know whether they started batch 2. Clear is: They have engineering problems, they have court action going on from changing their ToS several times after sale and they suffered BIG reputation damage. Basically, they are out of business or very close. Only a brain dead monkey would buy from them in future. Maybe they recover, maybe not. Big potential to reduce FC. As of now - I will remove batch 5&6 from spreadsheet. Let's wait and see what they will do in Feb/ March to judge further. Maybe they mine with own chips? We simpy do not know. [4]

Cointerra:
These guys were said to have the biggest potential of the new vendors showing up. Solid staff, solid financials and overall profesional appearance. Fact is they are also late on their initial batch. As far as I followed their thread they are still struggeling to ship out their December units. We mainly see some guys shaking hands with the CEO for marketing purpose - no mass volume. Nevertheless, first units appear to be in hand by respected members of the community.
What else? Problems (challenges) with certification, problems with performance of the unit, problems with power consumption, problems with the boards. They have a working product: Yes. They do not have it shipped in masses and clearly under the expected performance. I still think these guys will pull it off and deliver what they promise soon. But I will reduce the FC due to the 20% less performance of the units. [5]

Bitmine:
Hmmm - I clearly have no idea. They are late yes. There seem to be some working chips yes. Do they seem to be profesional enough to ship in large quantities? - maximum chance 50% chance imho. Behaviour from the last 1-2 months: Strong lack of transparency and delaying tactics. They are buying time. Their customer base starts to get nervous. Let's see and wait. FC unchanged. [6]

BFL
Just dont want to comment on these guys. I will keep FC like it is. Next time maybe. Still see significant space for reduction here. The monarch looks like it will turn to molten lava in the second you power it....

blackarrow:
Another company basically predestined to fail. Horrible customer support. Last minute delay from February to MAI for their initial batch. Their chips/ product will be worthless by then. Customers start to jump the sinking ship. Chance of going bust within 6 month: Very high. Just my judgement. Anyway, the shipping volume we have in our spreadsheet is very low. I will let it unchanged this time. Next time we may see a reduction here. Other opinions welcome. [7]

Discount for broken gear:
Guys - we need a solid approach for this one. Do we have an engineer/ expert here who can help out? Some number like "1 out of 100 chips will fail within the first 60 days". Any hint is valuable as I think we need to include and maintain this position. [8]

Punching the number in our spreadsheet we have the following new picture (see below).


Now the hard part. Setting a new mid-Tier forecast value. In comparison to our first shot we have two major developments that need to be adressed.

A) Massive new hash power from various known and unknown sources (7.7 PH alone in January)
B) Basically all major new vendors are late, struggling or close to bust

Conclusion: Mainly based on the massive amount of hashing power added by various forces which is partly but not completely compensated by negative vendor behaviour - I will increase the Forecast by +27 PH to 95.000 Thash (13.3b diff) as of 01.07.2014. Basically I estimate we will see roughly 10-15 PH added to the network from now on until July.

Next update will be after 3-5 jumps with new basis or in case something major happens.

Thanks for following and providing valuable information!


Sources:
[1] No obvious major vendor shipped between 01.01.2014 and 05.02.2014. Roughly 8 PH got added simply from "Other" sources
[2] https://www.kncminer.com/news
[3] Following https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.17502
[4] Following https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=262052.0
[5] Following https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=269093.0
[6] Following https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=291141.1280
[7] Following https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.0
[8] No source yet. Any ideas welcome

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Update 07.04.2014

Final Words and Closing

Everybody, this is my last update on this thread. I am quite bound in different other tasks and will not have the time to observe, analyze and comment all current trends in detail anymore. This is unfortunate but sloppy analysis due to time pressure is below my standards, so I better quit to not give any false predictions  - Thank you everybody for your inputs and useful hints. Feel free to continue the thread or overtake.

This said, it doesnt mean I completely abandon our forecast of ~95 PH by end of June 2014. In contrary, I think it is still very viable even without looking forward on the last three months of the observed timeframe.

Why? Our last datapoint is from Feb 05 2014 with a hashrate of 18.8 PH and last jump is from Apr 05 2014 with 43.8 PH which means 2 month account for roughly 25 PH. In our last forecast update we predicted 10-15 PH per month until July. Looking on the last two months isolated our prediction was quite accurate until now and I dont see any game changing reasons.    

Right now we have different trends that slow down and reduce the PHs added (low BC price, MTGox damage, massive delays of basically all major vendors, rising energy expenses), but also compensating effects which speed up the growth (mainly new vendors popping up every day, lower hardware prices, massive datacenters etc...). This all evens out somehow and adds up to something between 10-15 PH per month for the next 3 months.

With big caution - final prediction: 90-100 PH by end of June 2014.

Cheers & I am out ;)

reserved

Great thread! I have been looking for this. Just using 30% diff change is not realistic in the long run and probable not in this timeframe either.

Let me start with some easy ones:

Thash:         4200 Thash
Origin:              KnCMiner
Product:              Neptune Batch I (customers only)
Expected Delivery:   Until Q2
Scanario:              Realistic
Source:              https://www.kncminer.com/categories/miners
Reasoning:      Probable going to be shipping early Q2 (since they expect to ship all three batches before end of Q2. They have sold 1200 with a low estimate of 3Thash so let's assume they run at 3.5Thash. 1200*3.5 = 4200.

Thash:         4200 Thash
Origin:              KnCMiner
Product:              Neptune Batch I (new customers)
Expected Delivery:   Until Q2
Scanario:              Realistic
Source:              https://www.kncminer.com/categories/miners
Reasoning:      Same reasoning as above.

Thash:         4200 Thash
Origin:              KnCMiner
Product:              Neptune Batch II
Expected Delivery:   Until Q2
Scanario:              Realistic
Source:              https://www.kncminer.com/categories/miners
Reasoning:      Same reasoning as above plus I assume that they will eventually be sold out.

ASICMINER has said that their next gen hardware total deployment will be somewhere between 2 to 20 PHps. So not much help there. I think 10-15 Phps is most likely.

In fact I've used 15 Phps from all major companies in H1 2014, in my calculations. If that's accurate (which it probably isn't), the difficulty should be about 10 billion by summer. After that I think the difficulty will plateau.

You can use this or not use it, none of this is new info, and I can't provide proof for any of these figures, except for the fact that the information is claimed to be derived from D&T's thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820.0  and used in this spreadsheet here
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqGoWjATRQK6dE1yTHpydkIwajhhUGF4ZGxFV2FDSVE&usp=sharing#gid=0
Which I can not validate except for cross referencing the two links.  I was hoping it might be a good addition to the starting point.

Thash:         2880 Thash
Origin:              Hashfast
Product:              BabyJets
Expected Delivery:   Nov and Dec batches (1000 each plus 880 MPP or reserve)
Scenario:              Maybe just late
Source:              Above- Same source for all- supposedly from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820.0 but could not verify all
Reasoning: Very late already, refunds due if they don't meet Dec 31 shipping, speculation that HF BJ's are already on the network at Eligius

Thash:         5500 Thash
Origin:              Cointerra
Product:              Terraminers
Expected Delivery:   Dec, Jan, Feb, March, April  batches(1000, 1500, 1000, 1000,1000)
Scenario:              Maybe late too, that's alot of work
Source:              Above- Same source for all- supposedly from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820.0 but could not verify all
Reasoning: rumblings about chip delays

Thash:         1800 Thash
Origin:              BFL
Product:              Monarch
Expected Delivery:   Feb, Feb, March (600 each)
Scenario:              Maybe late- Reputation for being late
Source:              Above- Same source for all- supposedly from https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820.0 but could not verify all
Reasoning:

Thash:         4000 Thash
Origin:              Bitmine
Product:              Coincraft Desk and Rig
Expected Delivery:   March 2 batches(2000 each, possibly 3900 )
Scenario:              Realistic, currently shipping Antminers
Source:              Above- Same source for all-  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820.0 but could not verify all
Reasoning:

Thash:         1000 Thash- a guess? Needs more info
Origin:              Blackarrow
Product:              Prospero x-1 and x-3, also minion rental, cloudhashing
Expected Delivery:   Feb, March, maybe April too- claim to be all batch 1
Scenario:              No confirmation of how many units they pre-sold or plan to ship
Source:              Above- Same source for all-  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=283820.0 but could not verify all
Reasoning: Can't find any supporting evidence to this one, but have an active reseller here, and appear to be still taking orders, so 1000 sounds kinda low. Maybe they can give us a hint.

I'm so glad this thread was moved and continued.
Thanks de_ixie, great move. ;D

@cloudhashing preparing to open mining facility near Dallas, with over $3 million in machines produced @cointerra
http://tinyurl.com/l7pybor  (http://tinyurl.com/l7pybor)

I tweeted this recently after reading an article by @zerohedge

3million purchase from Cointerra by Emmanuel Abiodun of CloudHashing & the Icelandic BTC Compound accounts for 500 machines... Not sure which batch. My guess is early.

Many of your numbers are way too low.
First of all, AFAIK cointerra is making batches of >2PH each. At least their first, december batch was 2PH and I would expect subsequent batches to be larger, not smaller.

600 Monarchs per month is laughably low. BFL being BFL, its anyone's guess when they will ship, but when they do, their volumes are likely  >10x that.  Josh is on record saying they expect to be able to assemble over 1000 Monarchs per day. If their order books only had 2 or 3 days worth of production, do you really think they wouldnt drop prices? Just from undelivered 65nm orders that were converted in to Monarchs or cloudhosting I would expect several thousand units at the very least.

Anyway, while I appreciate the effort, the result isnt going to be worth the effort. These companies arent telling us how much they will produce, because those numbers hurt their sales. Expect them to understate their capacity if they even say anything at all.

Puppet of course these numbers will be off but I think it would be worth the effort just to get the right order of magnitude. I would say the different views people posting here have of total hashrate in july differs from 20PH to 2000PH. We must be able to close that range a little bit.
Even if the conclusion is something like 100PH to 300PH (could be something different) I think it would have been worth the effort.

Cointerra is to low. I remember reading somewhere that they have batches of 1000, could it just be that darcimer's posting just is the number of units not the hashrate, meaning we double the numbers.

Regarding BFL, are volumes of >10x (18000 units) really realistic? This is question not a statement. Even if Josh thinks he can produce and sell 1000 monarcs every day, there must be a more realistic number for us to close the range between 20PH and 2000PH i july. One assumption could be that BFL will only be able to push on half hashing power of KnCminer before Q2 and set BFL to something like 7500PH TH in Q2. I might be completly off here. Discuss.

BFL are infamous for overpromising, Im not going to bet on when they will deliver, I would never order from them, but the reality is also that its now a 100+ employee company (Knc is what, 10 employees?) that has been raking in preorders for an eternity now and have been shipping close to 1000 miners per day recently. Miners that are more complex to manufacture and assemble than Monarch. Considering they have not yet dropped their price one penny, I suspect they are not short on orders.

As for the combined network hashrate, IMO a better way to estimate it is simply looking at the profitability. As long as mining is substantially more profitable than it costs in electricity, the hashrate will go up as fast as all vendors combined can deliver. At todays BTC price, and assuming ~$0.1-0.2/KWH that means a race towards 500- 1000 PH. Anyone who thinks we will be at 20PH next July is smoking some weird stuff.

Here is a chart:
http://i.imm.io/1naAH.png

Yes 20PH next July is smoking some weird stuff but so is 2000PH i guess.

I don't think the end game calculation will be a good prediction for the next 6 months. But it is interesting. But I guess you need to include the price end game for bitcoin also in that calculation. I also believe that the end game of mining will be mining companies with employees wanting pay, stockholder wanting dividents, replacement cost of equipment etc... so I electricity won't be the only cost it must cover, but it will of course be the largest one. 

I believe that in a 6 months timeframe estimation of production capacity and the current orderbooks will propably give the best estimate. I could be wrong of course.

But back to BFL is there any information, excluding from Josh who I think might over promise a bit, of how large their orderbook is and how large their production capacity will be when/if they start delivering. Is there any past estimation before the conversion to Monarchs?

I agree we wont reach the "end game" equilibrium in 6 months, it will take much longer to get close to it, but when you see how far we are from that equilibrium, then you must realize that only brake on network growth is manufacturing capability. And its hard to see just how limited production capacity will be 6 months from here, taking in to account fabs have virtually unlimited production capacity and there are plenty of high volume assembly houses that are starving for business with the decline in PC sales. Perhaps the most realistic limiting factor will be datacenter availability.


Yes, but no one knows what that will be. First time I ran the above numbers, I assumed a bitcoin price of $200. Its now almost 4x that, and as a result, you pretty much get 4x higher numbers. If you think bitcoin will go further up, just multiply (or divide) the numbers in the chart accordingly.


Problem is that we have no solid data for that and no source that doesnt have an incentive to understate the numbers.


My brother read an article in a semicon magazine about BFL. Unfortunately I cant find it. He said the article mentioned BFL had (pre)sold $180M worth of bitcoin asics. That was 2 months or so ago. BFL sold their 65nm gear for around $50 per GH. That would work out to 9PH. Thats roughly twice the hashrate I believe they could be responsible for today. Which leads me to conclude about half of that sales number is for yet to be delivered 28nm gear. So around $90M.  At $7.8/GH thats 11 PH. Lots of assumptions, but its a ballpark number, at least for their order books 2 months ago, before the bitcoin boom. Id feel comfortable doubling that number today.

Datacenter availability, that's an interesting tought.
I agree with your post and we don't have any solid data so this is all going to be guesses of some sort.
22PH for BFL in Q2 could be a good guess (on the safe side I hope).

Do anyone have any ideas about Black Arrow? I read somewhere their first batch was going to be 8000 units, sounded like a lot of units/preorders to me at least if that meant the number for X-3 since I think they are now on batch 2. Anyway that's 16PH in Q1 if all is going according to plan. And maybe another 16PH for Q2 for batch 2. But I have no source for this.

About BA:
"We plan to manufacture 8000 ASICs in the first batch (800 Thash)."
http://ecointalk.net/topic/11-prepaying-full-or-50/?p=17

800TH, that was much much lower than I expected. Could it be a case of understating the numbers?

Its possible, though if I were to guess, Id say they are honest. BA is not a large company, they were the last vendor to announce their (28nm)  product, and as result had a tough time, certainly  initially, getting a meaningful amount of orders. I always  suspected they were one of the few companies with a realistic delivery schedule, but most miners got fooled by BFL, HF & Co who promised them delivery so much sooner.

ANyway, now that HF has fallen from grace, CT sold out for months, I do get the impression BA sales have picked up substantially recently, so maybe they will aim a bit higher for subsequent batches. Whether that will make them a player that needs to be counted with in the overall picture, I dunno.

This is pretty insignificant. Preamble is misspelled on the OP.  It just bugs me.

Something to consider, if the total hash is 10 phs, and it doubles, effectively doubling difficulty, what % of the first 10 phs gets turned off?  Once the old equipment breaks even, it's house money, and I suspect only breakage or electricity>btc will be the only reason to decommission.  So does it all stay on for 2014? Or does much of it become too expensive?

Only that part which is no longer operationally profitable, ie costs more in electricity than it generates in mining. Very few, if any, asics would become operationally unprofitable in a 20PH network, unless your electricity costs are  high, or BTC value tumbles. Maybe some obsolete first gen Asicminer/avalon gear, which by then would form an insignificant percentage of the network. En even then, rather than being shut down, I suspect most owners will either continue operating at a loss or sell their gear to someone with cheaper electricity (or poor math skills).

Ya, but it seems clear we're not talking about a 20 ph network, but like 45 ph/s minimum just by April!?

Buy BTC in tripple digits while you can! Backing up the truck. Miners! Really?! Just can't help yourselves. And thanks for raising the value of my BTC!

Thank you everybody for your input. I will consolidate the data today and make a first draft. We can continue tweaking the numbers as time progresses.

Updated

At today's BTC prices you won't see anything getting turned off until we are in the 75 Ph/s region. Even then, the gear that is no longer cost effective to operate will be a small part of the total rate, so the result won't be noticeable.

A larger factor in network growth will be the time to break even on the hardware investment.  Puppet is very optimistic about price reductions, with his lowest hardware cost being less than 1/2 of the cheapest pre-order prices.  On top of that, deployments at any scale have substantial facility costs for racks, network gear, cooling and power.  These can easily approach $1000 / Th/s.

Without more massive bitcoin appreciation, the risk reward for buying hardware will look pretty ugly by the end of Q1 2014.  Paying 10s of thousands of dollars, 4 months in advance is tempting when you earn your money back in 2 weeks.  When it will take 6 months of hashing with stable difficulty and exchange rates, the smart money is going to step back.

Prices will drop that low and much lower. Lets take BFL monarch as a baseline for a second. I've  linked this table before, that shows the BOM of highend video cards:
https://i.imgur.com/vkRDt.jpg
source: Mercury Research

If you eliminate the components you dont need on a miner (mostly GPU and VRAM) you end up with $47 for a 6970. A card which has comparable power draw and size as a Monarch (but which also includes a ton or irrelevant components and connectors like crossfire, DVI, HDMI, audio, PCIe 16x, ..  and a far more complicated 14+ layer PCB to accommodate the ultra high clockspeeds and bandwidth of the VRAM).

Which leaves one to estimate the cost of the ASICs. With a per 28nm wafer price of $4000 (50% above high volume prices), a 400GH hashfast golden nonce chip would cost somewhere on the order of $30 after packaging and yield. I assume BFL and most other vendors will be in the same ballpark, order of magnitude of $100 per TH for the chips.

Combine both, and add some minimum operating margin and you will see that $1000 per TH provides these vendors with gross margins that would make intel and nvidia green with envy. In high volumes, a 600GH Monarch probably costs BFL barely over $100 in marginal production cost.

Your approach is good, but the numbers are bad.

AMD buys components for 100s of millions of boards. They have full time staff ordering quarters in advance and negotiating hard over every 10th of a penny (literally!).  At best mining hardware supplies will build a few 10s of thousands of systems.  At that level, the manufacturers of components won't even pick up the phone.  They will have to buy from a distributor who buys from a wholesaler with markups at every stage.  Double the component cost and you'd have a good number for the end of next year when manufacturers can negotiate based on a stable build plan.

Packaging costs for the kind of silicon being used here often higher than the silicon.  And yield can suck at both the silicon level and the packaging level, especially with the multi-chip modules being used by Hashfast and Cointerra (I have no idea what bullshit labs is doing, and will never care).  Packaged silicon costs are going to be more like $150-$200 per Th/s at best.

That just gets you to a bare board.  To get to a system level you still need cooling (high performance = high cost), a case, and power supply.  All that puts you in the range of $400 / Th/s cost at best.

Then you need to account for overhead.  Each of the professional companies have staffing on the order of 10 people, many of whom command high salaries.  Offices, health care, travel and marketing all have to be shared over the units sold.  Let's assume your typical company moves 50 Ph/s in 2014, and has $2.5M in operating expenses.  (that would be tremendous sales, and low costs).  That would add another $50 / Th/s to the system cost.

Now, how much profit is going to be acceptable?  Especially since the alternative is to keep the hardware and operate it yourself.

Prices will come down, but not as much as you think.

You are off by orders of magnitude. AMD sells less than 1M high end (game grade) videocards per quarter. And thats AMD, consider the bazillion OEM's that sell cards that are price competitive, yet are much lower volume, probably in same ballpark if not below some bitcoin asic manufacturers 6 months from here. Sure, AMD and nVidia will have a volume pricing advantage, but its not going to matter for this comparison, and its not going to be anywhere near a factor 2x.


Packaging is priced per ball typically. The bitcoin asics arent that high pin count, there is no way it would cost more than $10 per chip. More likely $2-5 in volume. FWIW, I calculated using $10 in packaging cost, though I think $2 is probably closer once they achieve volume's of 100K's.

As for MCM's. If it were more expensive to package 4 dies in a chip than doing 4 chips, why would they?  You might argue for watercooling that the cooling is significantly cheaper, but even KnC is using MCM's with off the shelve air cooling.


Its not going to suck for everyone all the time, which is what matters. And yield shouldnt be a problem, considering these chips have dozens of "cores" that can be disabled if defective. They should achieve very near 100% yield if you allow a few bad cores per chip. Anyway, I assumed 90% yields, which is probably low for these chips.


Monarch doesnt have a PSU. SHould miners include that in their ROI calculation? Yeah. WIll they? Doubtful.  Many still have piles of PSU's. And even if you dont, a PSU doesnt become worthless after one year or when mining is no longer profitable. As for case, look at KnC. Just 2 sheets of plied aluminum. Cant cost more than $10 in volume, if that. You can buy full ATX cases with fans for that much.

BTW, chip cooling is included in that BOM. In fact, its about the most expensive part of the videocard.


I dont think so.


Yes there has to be a profit margin to pay the overhead. Im calculating BOM. In most businesses a 10% margin is what it takes to operate. Put it at 20% if you want. But keep in mind, once difficulty has gone up that much that market prices approach marginal cost, the alternative for those asic vendors is shutting their doors.


Lets check back in 24 months.

In 24 months it won't matter.  You were talking about the next year.  In 24 months if bitcoin survives, there will be 14 nm devices on the market and pricing will be totally different.

Your packaging numbers are reasonable for 5W chips.  For the 500W, GHz devices we are talking about now packaging is going to be more on the order of $25++.  Getting clean signal and power into these devices is difficult at high clock speeds.

Good point about the size of the card market. I overlooked AMD acting as a foundry in that space. It still leaves miner hardware manufacturers orders of magnitude too small for the pricing you anticipate.

I don't think any hardware manufacturer will operate with 10% margins.  This is not a commodity market.  It's an extremely specialized niche with a volatile underlying valuation and huge regulatory risks.  Investors will be looking for greater than 50% margins AND offloading of risks to customers through pre-payments.

Finally, there aren't enough hobby miners to support the suppliers currently in the market.  So, yes, all in costs per Th/s will absolutely apply to purchase decisions going forward.

Keep in mind Im estimating the "end game". If you just look at the PH range Im getting, bitcoin asics will be a big market, arguably as big as many high end gaming card manufacturers. 500 PH = over 1 million "Golden nonce" chips or 20 million Bitmine A1s. Thats high enough volume to get you the discounts that matter.

About the packaging.. 500-700 MHz isnt that much these days. ARM mobile chips do a lot more than that, and they still cost only ~$5 in volume. Die + packaging + odm margin. Sure, they are low power, but they also have far more complicated IO requirements. A bitcoin asic needs next to no IO. Look at bitmine's chip design, just a handful of (large) pads.

As for the OEM margins; what choice will they have? They can keep prices as high as they want, but if these chips are no longer operationally profitable to mine with, they wont sell any. If they are only barely operationally profitable, miners wont be interested in investing something that wont ROI in 10 years. This is not like GPU or CPU market. bitcoin OEMs will have to keep dropping prices, following difficulty (divided by bitcoin price)  or at some point, close their doors. So their BOM is a good indication of how low prices will eventually fall. Its not because these vendors currently can charge phenomenal prices that it has anything to do with cost. Its just because these chips are for now, phenomenally "profitable". Obviously that wont last.

Josh from BFL just said this yesterday:

_______________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________
No, there's not 100,000,000 Monarchs in the queue... less than 10k I believe. It will not take 100 years to fill.

If you order your Monarch today, I would expect it to be shipped sometime toward the end of March or beginning of April, possibly middle of April. It all depends on how long it takes to get the second batch of chips out of the foundry and ready to go, as well as any problem encountered with chip turn up, if any (hopefully none).

Nothing I have written here is any sort of guarantee on dates and merely speculation based on currently available information.
_______________________________________________________________________________ ________________________________

10K max Monarch's ordered.  That is 6PH.

And you believe him? Just the fact that he says "I believe" is enough to dismiss it. As if he wouldnt know how many they sold...
Its also kinda hard to rhyme this statement with another statement he made a while ago, claiming they would be able to assemble 1K Monarchs per day. If they really sold only 10K, thats ~10 days. Why would that take until April by his own always-incorrect forecast-not-a-promise?

Small update from my side:

- Starting point of 11Ph seems ok

- Hashfast failed to provide their initial batch on time; Lawsuit upcoming; Lets see whether they survive the upcoming months; My feeling is they will somehow scam out of the mess they've caused and survive - but at the cost of a heavily damaged reputation; They will provide less than we estimated, and later....; For now - until clarification of situation - lets keep FC like it is; We have potential to decrease our FC

- Some unknown source keeps adding massive hashpower despite no major vendor is shipping; We have to observe that trend; I am not sure what is behind that. Maybe just the sum of small various deployments (would not be a prob)? Or maybe a hidden project (would be a major prob)? My feeling is we have to increase our "Others" position soon

- We have a random statement of Josh from BFL claiming Monarch preorder count below 10k (equals ~6 PH). My feeling is we might soon have potential to decrease our BFL estimate

Next review around end of January; Earlier in case something big is happening. By end of this month, we will have a lot more information about some crucial milestones; Asicminer (timely tapeout of their Chip?), Bitmine (can they show a prototype?), Hashfast (will they bring their shit together?), blackarrow (nothing neg. heard...), Cointerra (do they deliver/ show a working product), KnC (any Milestones?) etc...

Stay tuned

Thanks for the excellent continuation of this thread de_ixie!


Here's a tiny update: Cointerra now sold out April and taking May orders:

http://cointerra.com/shop/

Thx - updated

One of the dark farms has a name at least.  Called '21e6' from here of all places (3/4 of the way down):  http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2014-01-09/bitcoin-mining-chips-gear-computing-groups-competition-heats-up


Big backers so could be huge.

 "Occasionally, he says, he stuffs the air holes of his machines with paper to bring up the temperature" haha

i am still not convinced that it brings up the hashrate

Of course it doesnt, its completely ridicolous. Worst case it can damage the hw.

I like this thread, it's good work and an excellent community resource. I hate to be a party pooper, but your wafer prices are way too low by a large margin. Qualcomm might get an untested 28nm wafer for $3500, but no rig vendor is getting their 28nm wafers any less than about $20k a pop - wafer fabs can sell more 28nm than they can make just now, the Bitcoin asic business is simply background noise to them.

Nonsense. First of all, fabs are idling.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) has seen its 28nm process utilization rate fall to 65-70% recently, due to a cutback of customer orders, according to ind
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20131209PD213.html

30-35% of their capacity is unused. Hardly "they can sell more then they can make" is it.

Your price estimates are even further off. Volume prices is below $3000 nowadays.  Low volume prices through intermediaries may be much higher, but thats irrelevant when estimating the "end game". To get to anywhere near the hashrates I predict, you are talking about significant volumes of wafers anyway.

When did you llast see a quotation or invoice from TSMC or Global Foundiries for 28nm?

Any clue where this 5PH in ~10 days is from?

What are the options?
the Antminer family of products
Cointerra testing
Private hashing

I just hope it's something we already factored in..

I did also a forecast, but only based on history:


Development of difficulty since 15.09.13
Dates   days to solve 2016   difficulty    increased in %
15.09.13- 26.09.13   11   112628549   --
26.09.13-7.10.13   11   148819200   32,13
7.10.13-17.10.13   10   189281249   27,19
17.10.13-26.10.13   9   267731249   41,48
26.10.13-06.11.13   11   390928788   46,02
6.11.13-18.11.13   12   510929738   30,07
18.11.13-30.11.13   12   609482680   19,29
30.11.13-11.12.13   11   707408283   16,07
11.12.13-22.12.13   11   908350862   28,41
22.13.13-03.01.14   12   1180923195   30,01
03.01.14-14.01.14   11   1418481395   20,12
14.01.14- ??              1789546951      26,15

= average time to solve 2016 Blocks: 121/11 = 11
= average difficulty increase: 316,94 / 11 = 28,81 %

Forecast
dates    days for solving 2016   difficulty    increased in %
14.01.14-25.01.14    11   1789546951   26,15
25.01.14-05.02.14    11   2305115427   28,81
                            11   2969219182   28,81
                            11   3824651228   28,81
                            11   4926533247   28,81
                            11   6345867476   28,81
                            11   8174111896   28,81
                            11   10529073533   28,81
                            11   13562499618   28,81
                                  11   17469855758   28,81
                            11   22502921202   28,81
                            11   28986012801   28,81
                            11   37336883088   28,81
17.06.14-28.06.14      11   48093639106   28,81

I was to lazy to put in all the dates :-D

Problem is that most people and also richer people saw the 1k btc price and think they can get even more richer. If a few off those start self producing or private orders yea then we can see even crazyer increasements. Lets hope everything is calculated here because thats were me own investment off the long term is based on.

We've spent a lot of time on a Behavioral Model to try to make some sense of what's going on. It pretty soon became clear that there is tipping point where miners will stop buying new kit, because they simply will never make a profit. The difficulty can't keep going up exponentially as a result (unless the Bitcoin value follows the same trend).Our prediction shows difficulty in mid-June at around 18,000,000,000,  25,000,000,000 by end 2014. At that time a TH will earn about $400 a month and eat a good portion of that in electricity costs. As a result, it's worth less than $1.3 per Gigahash/sec.

Due to the preorder cycle, it will take 3-4 months for the feedback of difficulty to impact buying behavior. So difficulty continues ramping up way beyond your expectation, and prices in the secondary markers collapse.  The overshoot might be moderated by a major supplier going bankrupt and not delivering but otherwise expect your year end prediction to be reached in July.

I know people with a lot off Money, they are indeed Producing there own hardware.
Only then its still highly profitable .

And in countries with cheap electricity .  ;)

For the coming, 5 times atleast   30 % + up.


H

You're making assumptions about assumptions hereon buying behavior based on the huge price jump in Q4 last year. You can't automatically factor in that happening again, so as soon as the difficulty hits about 15000 x 10e6 the current (yet to be delivered) $3/GH rigs will never be profitable and it's not going to take a genius to see the trend,

The companies that have their own asics are in a slightly different boat but even they have to look at RI and they might not be quite so keen to load in capacity which might not make their ROI target.

Time will tell what approach is right, neither of us have a crystal ball.

Time may tell, but I can already tell who is talking his book.

Yes, it's not exactly a secret what we plan to do, but we plan to do it right. We have indeed developed a behavioral model to try to predict what the market for rigs might be, but since we won't be delivering anything until August it's no advantage to suggest that some of the estimates other have submitted might be a bit too high. Scare tactics, if you will. Why would anyone want to do  such a thing?

If we're suggesting that the difficulty might not be so high, it's going to benefit our competitors (assuming we actually get to the competing stage and that's not a foregone conclusion) who will get more people ordering if they think they might have a chance of profitability on their purchase.

So I'm a bit unclear what book you think we might be talking/selling. One that tells the truth, perhaps?

I think theres a issue with your predictions: You assume that the miners act rational. I think its more like: "what, I can produce money? sounds good! lets do that!" If people would act rational, the grow of the hashrate would have stopped long ago. So I think that the hashrate will keep growing exponentially and therefore pushing the price of bitcoins up.

Another thing to consider is the endless pool of new people getting into the game. I wish I knew what percentage of products the miner manufactures sell are repeat customers. Most business rely on something like 80% repeat business. If this is the case for mining hardware companies they will quickly go out of business.(quickly like in 2 to 5 years) But I think the reality is more like 20% repeat and 80% new with a huge lineup. The lineup of people who cant do math and think this is get rich quick is huge for now. But bitcoin is still a tiny market and something like 1% of users holding 80% of BTC. So in the long run it may be good. This is just the growing pains of a new market.

Here's another Cointerra data source
http://cointerra.com/genisis-block-cointerra-hashfast-sell-17m-bitcoin-miners-open-second-batch-sales/

Great topic, I see Bitmain mentioned (Antminers) but not included in the forecast - are they low volume

I tried to summarize all those data into a spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqGoWjATRQK6dE1yTHpydkIwajhhUGF4ZGxFV2FDSVE&usp=drive_web#gid=1 (https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AqGoWjATRQK6dE1yTHpydkIwajhhUGF4ZGxFV2FDSVE&usp=drive_web#gid=1)
This also outputs difficulties estimates on the first tab, which you can then enter on http://coinplorer.com/Hardware/Simulate (http://coinplorer.com/Hardware/Simulate) (select "manual difficulty input") to estimate revenues, etc.

Let me know if you disagree with any data, the spreadsheet is pretty easy to change ^^

Nice spreadsheet, it would be interesting just for fun to extend it into the 2nd half of the year, perhaps just starting with the idea that each company will try to gradually increase their sold hash rate each month.

Also in recent new CoinTerra announced their first shipments will not reach 2 TH/s per unit. Looks like each of their units may average around 1.65 TH/s until they can fix their power usage at some future revision.

Sure, do you have any shipping estimate for Q3/Q4? Nothing have been announced yet to my knowledge.

Yep, corrected. 600*1.65=990, rounded to 1000.

Thank you everybody for your input

I will do an update with refinded numbers after the next difficulty jump. We will use the new diff. level as the new starting point and we will also include all new information provided.

Cheers

Thanks a lot for that :D

Great value in that spreadsheet (& this whole topic)

March looking like the perfect storm for anyone looking to earn a payback on existing hardware - more hashing increase than all other months combined
I know the objective is a prediction for end of June, but since you've done that much work already - could/should it be smoothed out more ?

  5,800 = Feb Total
48,600 = March Total
14,750 = April Total
  5,250 = May Total
  1,500 = June Total
 
Is the front loading accidental or based on real hard data ?
(insofar as any ASIC Miner companies predictions are real/hard data)

EDIT : I'll see if I can do some smoothing out myself - since the next couple of months concerns me just as much as mid-year

This thread is very useful to estimate quantities shipped, but doesn't tell anything on the - as important - when, so I tried to estimate.
I didn't want to artificially "even" the numbers. Simply let me know if you think that some shipping dates might be wrong.

I didn't understand this part BTW, sorry.

I think he was asking why it seems so much new hash rate is hitting in March/April, then tapering off a bit.

Ok, then I think I already answered ^^ I simply put the estimated numbers in the columns I think the quantities will be shipped, not artificially smoothing them by looking at the totals

KnC all delivered in March ?

Just meant were you more concerned about the overall End of June figure and less concerned about the actual staged release of product - which you already answered :-)

I need to do more research before offering alternative dates so only able to query your dates at this point

Reading beyond the headline in this http://forum.kncminer.com/forum/off-topic/miners-cafe/28830-seems-like-good-news-for-neptune
seems to me it is unlikely to be KnC product they're making

Will post something more constructive when I've done more checking

ASICMiner has provided a news update: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=438359 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=438359)

Sounds like they are maybe 2 or 3 weeks behind schedule, but otherwise on track for deploying a whole lot of cheap, high-efficiency chips. Since there is currently no other chip manufacturer announcing anything close to those J/GH, I assume ASICMiner will be supplying these heavily on into the summer.

- Which schedule? When do you think they will start shipping?
- They speak about an option for "immediate delivery" when "Chips will be available for ordering once the functionality and yield rate are confirmed with testing on actual chips.", seems pretty close, isn't?

I'm just going by their previously announced tapeout date of around Jan 20th. Turned out to be more in early Feb they are saying now. So 2-3 weeks.

As for massive amounts of their hashrate hitting the network, those chips have to still be transported and someone has to have boards made to put them on. I'm not a manufacturing expert, but if the chips just start to be available in March, it might not be until April that you see any 3rd party boards for sale using ASICMiner chips. Now, ASICMiner says they will also be selling their own "devices", so maybe some of theirs will start to hit in late March? Just guessing.

Black Arrow just pushed back first deliveries to at least May 1st: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg4832034#msg4832034 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=294197.msg4832034#msg4832034)

That's breaking news! I updated the spreadsheet with that info.

So you are expecting them to stop production once they deliver a batch?

(which I think might be the point of the original question?)

Nope, but I can't/don't want to speculate on this. We don't know yet if they will deliver the full batch, continue producing it, release a new chip, etc.
Let me know what you'd like, in which cells, and we can discuss about this (possibly adding them with a different color, to differentiate announcements and speculation)

Do you think we'll see 40-46% jumps like in october when cointerra et all ships? Or can we expect it being around 20-25% jumps from now on?

It's possible to see some bigger jumps in March and April particularly I think. Did you look at crazy's spreadsheet? It shows a couple of spikes over 40%. But that is if all the vendors shipped exactly on time, and managed to get out those full quantities. It seems to me historically that most vendors are late and/or take longer to deliver the whole shipment. So I kinda lean towards the spreadsheet being a more conservative/worst case. But then you look at the current network hashrate it is jumping up, clearly there are significant sources of hashrate this spreadsheet isn't taking into account...

It looks like the beginning of April will be interesting.
http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/log-rise-times.png (http://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/log-rise-times.png)

I think some of the hashfast stuff is starting to ship earlier than in the spreadsheet. I saw one of their customer mention today they got theirs, and they are batch #2. On the other hand, the MPP stuff has not shipped and the company hasn't released any info on when it will.

So today's new is KNC. As best I can tell:

1. The Neptune is running quite a bit late. They still haven't wrapped up their chip design. I'm guessing May or later for these?

2. They are beginning construction on their own cloudhashing type farm, using at first their older 28nm chips/Jupiters. The timing of when this will be ready is unknown. But it might very well begin coming online in Q2, as some people speculate they have already been producing/hoarding 28nm chips for it so they may be ready to go. So here's a source of hashpower not in the spreadsheet.

We have a lot of new information to crunch our numbers. I will sit down on weekend and publish an update latest sunday.

Thanks again for all the inputs

Thank you for providing the info in this thread.  I will be following it closely.

This article has a little more info on the KNC farm:

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/02/06/bitcoin-miners-building-10-megawatt-data-center-sweden/ (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2014/02/06/bitcoin-miners-building-10-megawatt-data-center-sweden/)

So, 10 megawatts, using very rough numbers of 1000 watts per KNC Jupiter, then something like 600 GH/s per Jupiter, this is in the ballpark of 6 PH/s? Someone check my math.

10 MW = 10,000 kW = 10,000 Jupiters * 600 GH/s/Jupiter = 6,000,000 GH/s = 6 PH/s.

now the hashrate just hit 22m ph,its rapidly increasing now
http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

ASICMiner further comments from board meeting:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg5025133#msg5025133 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg5025133#msg5025133)

We'll have to see if that total hashrate shipping comment stands or is revised. But apparently he is saying for the total Gen3 chip sales for the rest of this year, it could be in the range of 400 PH/s to 1600 PH/s. I guess we need to start tossing around exahash/s estimates when we do Q3/Q4 spreadsheet.

Example of additional Bitfury chips sold to 3rd parties coming online next month:

(200+ TH example) https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=452850.0;topicseen (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=452850.0;topicseen)

Also Avalon is still around, and has announced a 3rd gen chip to begin sampling in March, so assume that is coming into force in May? Also they mention they have already shipped 6 PH/s of their 2nd gen chips and have increased production:

http://avalon-asics.com/happy-chinese-new-year/ (http://avalon-asics.com/happy-chinese-new-year/)

Things like these are how the overall hash rate increases even when the other entities on the current spreadsheet aren't shipping currently.

OP update - Thanks for the ongoing effort

Thank you for the update. Very informative.

You factor broken gear, but what about decommissioned hardware ?
When difficulty will go up, old hardware (1-100Gh/s) will eventualy be sent to the trash.
It may amount to 1-5 Phs.

I doubt they'll hash forever, even if some people have access to free power.

Eric

I am remember someone calculatiing that at current BC pricetag even the least energy efficient asics out there are still profitable until multiple b difficulty. If this is true people will not turn them off. Would be glad in case someone could dig this out. Will also keep my eyes open on that point

Sometime before my gear reaches its efficiency limit I plan to sell it off. There's always folks out there with access to free electricity who will buy it.

Video/photos of KNC's new farm:

http://www.gp.se/nyheter/sverige/1.2276893-datorhall-for-bitcoin-byggs-i-boden (http://www.gp.se/nyheter/sverige/1.2276893-datorhall-for-bitcoin-byggs-i-boden)

http://imgur.com/a/jzT5E (http://imgur.com/a/jzT5E)

The good news is part of it is already up and running, so likely one of those big Eligius users is KNC, and that is why they keep growing so much. Looks like the rest of this facility could be up and running by end of March? Maybe that's the bad news.

Good point - highly likely the top two eligius contributers (~2 PH) are KnC

People were claiming that the 2nd one (1Nbq) was Bitmain / Antminer.  They've been a heavy hitter in Eligius for a longer period, a few weeks at least, and they ramped up from ~500TH.  The 1st one (1A73) just hit within the last week.

I remember I read about that - 1Nbq beeing Bitmain, started deploying december 6th,
1A73 started february 5th, and 7 days later was at 1 THash.

I don't think Bitmain is at Eligius... couple reasons. 1, when you get an antminer from them it always has their default pool settings still in it from their "testing". It looks like they have their own pool probably. 2, they recently sold off a big chunk of their farm when they sold several thousand units in the past month, yet that Eligius user keeps growing.

KNC has opened up ordering on another 1000 Neptune units:

https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-76 (https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-76)

edit: some speculation that most or all of this is due to current customer canceled orders, so it may be a wash in terms of extra hashrate.

It's true that they've been claimed to be that Eligius address, however they are currently (also?!) mining in BTCGuild -> AntMiner -> 353,536.97 GH/s.

ASICMiner gen 3 hardware pre-sales may be starting:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg5153058#msg5153058 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg5153058#msg5153058)

~$1800/TH, 600 watts/TH, due by Apr 20th.

It seems that the AntMiner team is running at 969,515.18 GH/s now (ID 431 474).

With all the Chinese miners at 1TH that have hit the forums lately coming out march/april it seems close to impossible to actually track and make any decent estimates? Who knows how much they will deliver

hashfast selling 2 TH version of Sierra due in April

http://hashfast.com/shop/sierraevo/ (http://hashfast.com/shop/sierraevo/)

I think by the time hardware is decommissioned it will be so small as to not be noticed. For example if you try to find when cup mining stopped or gpu mining stopped. If everyone turned off their 300kh usb keys difficult will go up by 25% vs 25.3% next change. When 10gh blades are turned off it will be and increase of 25% vs 26% at next difficulty ect.

Peta-mine has begun deployment, also announcing they are designing their own boards to work with a large supply of A1 chips.

http://www.peta-mine.co/petamine-will-deploy-700-ths-or-8-68-ghs-per-share/ (http://www.peta-mine.co/petamine-will-deploy-700-ths-or-8-68-ghs-per-share/)

A lot of that old hardware is being sold to suckers on ebay, so even the unprofitable hashing power will stay around awhile.  Well, at least until Mom gets the electricity bill... ;-)

Reminder to self: Bitmine capacity confirmed 50unit/day a 1TH (=1-1.5PH/ month)

Top Eligius contributor(s), in one tx
https://blockchain.info/tx/026f92da78db19fe561a05f0a77104619783452a8f24a4efed8719abd9553a95?show_adv=false

Great post, many thanks to the op, because i always wanted to do some fc about network hashrate

Seems that the first two eligius workers are the same person

Reminder to myself:

KnC Update:

https://www.kncminer.com/news/news-78

BFL Update:

https://forums.butterflylabs.com/announcements/4414-monarch-information-2.html#post77863

Cointerra Update:

Shipped 1000 units

Hashfast Update:

Evo something ... lol

BITMAIN has announced that their AntMiner S1 / U1 / U2 solutions hold 20.3% of the network (February 2014).

According to http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/ the network hash rate has been between 17.590 - 32.094 PH/s in February, 2014 (just taken off the graph, so there may be mistakes). Thus BITMAIN's claim would be in the range of 3.571 - 6,515 PH/s, but most likely in the 5.3 - 6.5 PH/s range due to the date posted (today).

Source: "20.3% of the Bitcoin network hashing power now (Feb 2014) is contributed by Antminer Solutions" https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=501034.msg5518711#msg5518711

Obligatory 'bump' to include Spondoolies (http://www.spondoolies-tech.com/)  -- https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=521520.0

Unknown how many units they're got on the books so far, but we may be able to speculate.

VMC (www.virtualminingcorp.com) just sold ~51Th/s and are planning on having ~200Th/s mining for ActiveMining by the end of April¹.They sold out all 100 Fash-Hash One Prospectors² they had in stock in about twelve hours. I'm not sure what the continued roll out schedule beyond this will look like but they're another one to watch.

¹²http://virtualminingcorp.com/shop1/index.php?id_product=38&controller=product

ActM Eligius (http://eligius.st/~wizkid057/newstats/userstats.php/1DJpsvnM7xTnQbWEhLYyCyfxQyxwupEzCa)
Independent Verification and Setup Guide (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=462370.msg6069576#msg6069576)
You can also track VMC sales via their website. (http://virtualminingcorp.com/shop1/index.php?id_product=38&controller=product) - At time of writing their are 165 units left in stock of 200.

Thanks guys.

Has this been quoted regarding Act?

5000 boards (2.5PH) in april
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=206488.msg5995764#msg5995764

Final Words and Closing

Everybody, this is my last update on this thread. I am quite bound in different other tasks and will not have the time to observe, analyze and comment all current trends in detail anymore. This is unfortunate but sloppy analysis due to time pressure is below my standards, so I better quit to not give any false predictions  - Thank you everybody for your inputs and useful hints. Feel free to continue the thread or overtake.

This said, it doesnt mean I completely abandon our forecast of ~95 PH by end of June 2014. In contrary, I think it is still very viable even without looking forward on the last three months of the observed timeframe.

Why? Our last datapoint is from Feb 05 2014 with a hashrate of 18.8 PH and last jump is from Apr 05 2014 with 43.8 PH which means 2 month account for roughly 25 PH. In our last forecast update we predicted 10-15 PH per month until July. Looking on the last two months isolated our prediction was quite accurate until now and I dont see any game changing reasons.    

Right now we have different trends that slow down and reduce the PHs added (low BC price, MTGox damage, massive delays of basically all major vendors, rising energy expenses), but also compensating effects which speed up the growth (mainly new vendors popping up every day, lower hardware prices, massive datacenters etc...). This all evens out somehow and adds up to something between 10-15 PH per month for the next 3 months.

With big caution - final prediction: 90-100 PH by end of June 2014.

Cheers & I am out ;)

I noticed just today about 700TH was added to the network today.  Is this mainly because of the first batch Antminer s2, some Cointerra

Thank you for all your hard work. I'm sure I speak for the many people that have viewed your post and used the information to plan their mining strategy.

AM has mentioned to a shareholder they are planning to have produced over 100 PH of their gen3 chips through June. It does appear we may reach the exahash range by end of this year for the total network.

Im sure most miners use more than one id and more than 1 pool.

Maybe you missed when they said the s1 was 20+% of network. That's minimum 11PH now. Or similar to 60000 s1

Do you see it doable with prices of ~1$/GH?

At network rate of 1 exohash(?) ie 1,000,000 TH, with Btc at $500 you'd make roughly $49 a MONTH per Th of capacity. Same TH at 0.6 Joule/GH would consume nearly, wait for it, $49 a month in electricity if you pay the US average cost of 11 cents/kWh. Yes, I know you can get it for less than 4 cents per kWh in Washington state if you're an industrial customer, but most miners don't live there..

Even at 0.5 Joules/GH  you would pay $41 for your monthly electricity bill.

So the answer to the question is : No.

Even assuming you do get 4 cents perkWh / 0.6 Joules/GH you still only make $34  month. If you want that repaid in 9 months then your 1TH would need to cost 9 x $34 = $306, or $0.36/(GH/sec). 

Holy Crap the network just jumped 3.5 PH in the last half hour

*listen*

Thash:           1380-1950 Thash (300 * 4.6Th-6.5Th)
Origin:           Spondoolies-Tech
Product:           SP30
Expected Delivery:     August
Tier:                    Upper
Source:           https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=575499.0

Reasoning:             Look at the Group buy thread. They also delivered their SP10 Miners.

will be there a continue? it seems an elaborated and good statistic

Hi Johny, this was an one time effort by me. A lot of work - feel free to continue ;)

Looking back on June diff. we were quite close!  8)

Jun 29 2014   16,818,461,371   24.93%   120,391,236 GH/s
Jun 18 2014   13,462,580,115   14.51%   96,368,902 GH/s

Prediction was really nice!

Nevertheless i am really baffled about the recent Hashratespikes.

I didnt expect such 20% gaps at this level...