Bitcoin Forum

What up everybody -

Trying to get an estimation for what the btc mining difficulty factor will be in 1 month, 3 months, 6 months, 1 year, 3 years and 5 years from now??

Best estimations I can find only include the next difficultly level but don't go any further.  Don't know how to figure it out myself obv..

Please help me :)  Willing to send a few chips on seals with clubs for solid detailed answer.

Thanks

In 5 years I am sure it'd be in the high trillions, maybe even quadrillions.

Have you taken into account lessening block rewards (I.E. block halving)? Miners will be persuaded to stop mining or to leave to an altcoin.

Unless you can predict what scientific advancements are going to be made in the building of application specific integrated chips, it is nearly impossible to predict what the difficulty will be more than a year from now.  Any prediction would just be a wild guess.  You'd do just as well throwing darts at numbers on a dartboard, or rolling dice to predict it.

So I don't understand what is significant about application specific integrated chips?  What are they and what is their relationship to mining difficultly?

Do you agree with this calculators estimates (in general) or do you think they are "throwing darts" - https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/calculator  ??

Difficultly Increases is a problem for some ASICs that are designed to chew on a large chunk without being interruped as often as needed for full efficiency on p2pool.

Application Specific Integrated Chips (ASIC) are used for mining bitcoins.  They are computer chips that are designed to do a single thing very well, and nothing else.  Currently the vast majority of Bitcoin mining is done by ASIC that are designed specifically to mine bitcoin blocks as fast and efficiently as possible.

Proof-of-work difficulty in bitcoin is designed to self-adjust after every 2016 blocks to try to keep the rate that blocks are solved close to an average of 10 minutes per block.

This means that as more ASIC are manufactured, and as the technology advances so that the newer ASIC can mine faster and more efficiently, the difficulty will have to increase to adjust for the additional hash power added to the network.  The only way to predict what the difficulty will be years in the future with any accuracy at all, would be to predict how many bitcoin block hashing ASIC will be sold, and how fast and efficiently they will operate.  In other words, you need to predict what scientific advancements are going to be made in the building of ASIC.

The difficulty will depend on these factors:
1. The block reward.
2. The cost of the equipment, power, cooling, and space (in BTC)
3. Advances in technology that affect H/J and H/s/BTC

The block reward will be changing.

First we will see more transaction fees awarded to minors as more transactions happen from Bitcoin being adopted more widely. Right now we have almost no transactions compared to Visa, so we have almost no rewards for transaction fees going to minors. Then in a couple of years we drop to 12.5 BTC per block solved as a "mining" reward (coins created). Hopefully by then transactions will have ramped up significantly enough to replace some of the loss of coin creation, or the price goes moonward, otherwise we may have a mass minor exodus.

Yes ,it is more difficult now to mining the bitcoin ,one day can get 0.1 bit coin and need 10 days to get 1 bit coin .use the (machine cost +power+cooling +space )/10days/bitcoin, it cost a long time to get back cost and profit .

we were discussing just now if we use the machine cost and all other cost to buy bit coin directly ,it is more easy maybe .What do you think ?

You could not be more wrong if your life depended on it. BTC will be so valuable in 5 years the difficult will be irrelevant.

This is like a Gold Rush where only a fraction of the prospectors realize the "gold" is actually diamond-laden Technetium (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technitium).

It is very difficult to predict the future hash rates and difficulty.

In just one year (2013), the hash rate increased from around 20,000 GHash/s to 7,000,000 G Hash / s.

Now, it stands at 100,000,000 G Hash / s. May be we'll see 10,000,000,000 G Hash/s or more by the end of this year.

if that happens aren't all miners going to go down?

if you have less miner farm (only 3 big big big farms for example), the lottery of bitcoin is more equal ... so, no, miners stay at the end because of the random recompense.

5 years from now the diff is until tri-quad-octalions

cuz only 2 week the difficulty is up until 1 billion

Can't see 10'000 Phash/s by the end of this year.
That would mean 30% increase for every next step (18x).
Average increase last 10 steps is 17%. Continuing with this 17% gives 1'000 Phash/s by end of year.

Another interesting thing with 10'000 Phash/s - with current best ASICs using 0.8 kWh per 1 Thash/s, bitcoin has to be valued at $5300 to cover just for the electricity used (at $0.1/kWh).

Edit: and using 8'000 MW of electricity, output of about 10 average sized nuclear plants:
http://www.euronuclear.org/info/encyclopedia/n/nuclear-power-plant-world-wide.htm

4. Price of bitcoin

So now we are basing this off of your personal opinion of where the BTC price will go?

I hope I get to go much as I want to buy one and then if you go up

5 years from now, because it is difficult for the mining, perhaps none more bitcoin mining.
because the high difficult, need more biggest hardware for mining and income slightly. may be many who switch to another coin.

 
If you want to know because you are considering buying mining gear....just.....don't..... Ok?
There, I just saved you oodles of time and money.

An estimation beyond the next couple of months is nearly impossible to make accurately given that hardware coming off or online is hard to predict and efficiency increases over the coming years cannot be predicted. If I were you I'd use the average increase over the last 3 months (percentile) to make an approximation for the net 3 months.

Make a multi-option bet on https://www.betmoose.com with 5 ranges and share it - see what ppl vote for (and they'll probably do some good research since they're putting coin down). Prediction market power!

Also this should have been posted in Mining ;)

mining is always going to be a cat chasing its own tail game, the higher the difficulty, the more miners, the more miners the higher the difficulty.. (another analogy is that miners are always shooting themselves in their foot out of greed)

block halving makes weak miners who cant afford to continually upgrade, give up for a few months. and those big players continue on. what also happens is that the price of bitcoin rises (miners don't sell at a loss, causing a low supply, high demand price rise) to a level that miners are happy to sell at. again some miners will give up as they cant keep using their FIAT reserves to pay the electric.

but all in all the miners vs difficulty will keep rising.
this cat and mouse game has been going on for 5 years,
with the movement from CPU to GPU
with the movement from GPU to FPGA
with the movement from FPGA to ASIC 110nm
with the movement from ASIC 110nm to ASIC 55mn
with the movement from ASIC 55mn to smaller nm (faster asics) to smaller nm (faster asics) to smaller nm (faster asics)
not even the last halving stopped any of this.

the greed of miners will ensure that no matter what, there will never be a time that people can start up their old rigs and be able to mine like they did 'in the goold old days' of first having that rig.