Bitcoin Forum

What do you think about current ETH difficulty? The price drop VS difficulty is unreal. ETH has become unprofitable but difficulty is still high. I don't get it and smell bad things...

Some people pay hardly anything for their electricity, so if they've bough an ASIC at a time when the ETH price was much higher (so, at that time they calculated a very short ROI), it would still be a good idear for them to continue mining as long as they make any profit at all.

There are also hobby miners that don't care about the difficulty or the price... They'll just keep mining to make sure the difficulty stays sufficiently high.

Then there are the people that think the ETH price will rise again, and they keep mining at a net loss and HODL their proceeds untill the price is higher again... Offcourse these people don't realise they'd better turn off their mining rigs and buy ETH directly from an exchange with the electricity savings instead of pumping the electricity in their mining operation. Pumping money in electricity for mining will get them less ETH than buying ETH straight away.

My best guess would be that if the price continues to decrease, eventually people will start turning off their rigs, and the difficulty will decrease to (but that's just my gut feeling)

I don't believe ETH difficulty is real. I have two grounds for it:

1) ETH is not a GPU coin for a long time
2) Difficulty is manipulated for some reason

Difficulty is not protecting miners now. It fails as a protective mechanism and leads to decision making.

its the ice age combined with heavy asic mining and fpgas, most gpu miners have moved to other coins for a while now

Full disclosure: i'm not al altcoin guru, i haven't even read ethereum's whitepaper, and whenever i accept ETH i usually use MEW... However, i do know a thing or two about bitcoin (and altcoins cloned from bitcoin's source, like LTC, DOGE, NLG,...), so some of my assumptions might actually be wrong....

But... If my assumption that ETH's difficulty algorithm works more or less the same way as bitcoin's, i'd say it will be pretty hard to manipulate the difficulty of a high-diff network. In order to push the difficulty upwards, you'd need to broadcast more valid blocks... And in order to find a valid block, you'd need to have sufficient hashrate. So in case you need to push the difficulty upwards, you'd need a lot of hashrate. In this case, the difficulty wouldn't be manipulated or artifically high.... It would be backed with the hashrate you added to the network.

The opposite can potentially be done... If you have a large mining farm, and you focus on a low-diff coin, you can potentially manipulate the difficulty downwards by mining at full hashrate but not broadcasting part of the the valid blocks you find... This would keep the difficulty artificially low, eventough i can not find any valid reason to do such a thing.

I know ETH isn't a GPU coin, that's why i talked about ASIC's in my first post. But the fact that ETH's POW algo can be mined with an ASIC actually increases the potential of people keeping on mining even if the diff is so high they can't make any more profit. At least, that's what my gut feeling tells me.

Why? Well, i personally think that somebody who is running GPU rigs actually HAS to know what he's doing. He has to order the right GPU's, order risers, make sure the PSU is suitable, think about motherboards, compile mining software,... If a GPU miner can no longer make any profit, i believe he'll be able to switch to a different coin, and even a different algorithm in a very short time.

An ASIC owner nowadays just has to order an ASIC, plug it in, visit a gui served by the LAMP stack on the controller incorporated in his ASIC. He doesn't have to know anything on a technical level, he just has to plug everything in, and then enter the details he sees on his pool's FAQ.
Even if the ASIC owner has sufficient technical knowledge, in case of a price dip, he can only switch to coins using the same POW algo, limiting his choice drastically... IMHO, this would increase the odds of him just keep mining on the same chain, since his options are not that much anyways.

Like i said: this is my personal opionion and gut feeling... I don't have a lot of experience mining alt's, so my assumptions *can* be wrong

It's not profitable anymore, here in my country you will get almost nothing when you mine eth.
You've got to pay the electricity with the ETH you mine and you are still even short.
No longer profitable, high difficulty and low reward.

What range/timeframe are you people looking at when you say that ETH difficulty is rising?

Not sure if i'm doing something wrong but when i look at the ETH difficulty charts i see them on the decline for the past month. I assume this is because mining ETH is becoming less profitable and people are selling their rigs which is evident in the flood of GPUs in local market.

I'm using this as basis of ETH difficulty: https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart

By what mechanism(s) would the difficulty be manipulated?  The motivations for it are probably clearer.

Same thing happened in 2014-2015. Price of BTC crashed and everybody assumed that the blockchain would grind to a halt because miners would leave and that never happened. If you look at the difficulty chart, there was maybe one major difficulty reduction and remained flat ( the Antminer S5 days) for the next few months before going higher.

Some people just have good electricity rates, mine at a loss for speculation or just want to support the decentralization of the network.

If your electricity price is 5c/kWh, you can still make profit, but the ROI is long.

Assume that's the asics. Basically either turn em off, or let em run. Wonder if ETH has enough asics to support the network? Guess we're about to find out.

Maybe everyone who struggles in crypto will feel an inconvenience to the current price of eth so that there are no positive changes, hopefully your predictions about negative things will not happen.

What is the OP even talking about? Difficulty is not tied to a coin price, it never has been.

Spouting off these stupid conspiracy theories doesnt help anyone. Its actually actively dangerous to spread such misinformation.

Price = Mining attractiveness = More difficulty

There you go...