Bitcoin Forum

The current average time between blocks was 10.1 minutes over the last two days. If this keeps up, it will result in the difficulty going down for the first time in ~18 months!

New hardware is still being manufactured, so I expect the block solve time to increase over the next few days and result in a small difficulty increase, but it's nice to get a bit of relief from the ~25% increase we just had!

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Bitcoinwisdom that you linked yourself is still estimating +15%. Don't be fooled by day to day variance.

true  right now it is a lot of guess work….. using times between blocks days in advance is meh.


besides a builder like bitmaintech    could have 200,000 s-3's built and ready to ship right now.

  So while it looks like diff jumps may be low it is more because they hold back the gear.

The block generation time quoted on bitcoinwisdom is the average of the last 504 blocks, and it shows a 10.1 minute block generation time.

Also, in the bitcoinwisdom chart, you can clearly see the 504 block and 1008 block generation times sliding below the current difficulty.

I still expect the difficulty to go up this adjustment, but bet it will be a smallish increase of ~5%.

The bitcoinwisdom estimate of +15% is trending down. Two days ago, the estimate was +25%.

I hope my math is wrong but 200k S3s would mean 100PH/s which is simply absurd. It would require 10-20M$ AT LEAST just to build them so your number is WAY out of line... Just like AM who was dreaming of selling 60PH worth of chips in 1-2 months.


5% seems a bit too low. My guess is around 10%. Exciting times.

20,000 units maybe, so ~10 PH.

The original quote states 200k units. That's two hundred thousand.

The time between blocks is still trending down, and we now sit at a 10.2 minute block time.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

I suspect the 25% last difficulty change was caused by a combination of an incredible amount of hardware being added to the network combined with a lucky streak, and now luck has taken a turn for the worse.

read this:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=619438.0

according to that article it is statistically possible that difficulty adjustment has been overshoot and it fact the latest diff change should have been a bit lower.

The OP might be right on this one, a potential drop coming up at least on this round.

This is a wet dream for people (myself included) who bought S3's that we hopefully (bitmaintech??) will be getting July 12-14

Maybe if nothing else it will slow the flood of 'why the fuck did you buy an S3 that will never ever ever in a million years' ROI...lol

I guess we can hope. At least for another ten days.

Then following that will be the S3 storm once they are shipped and put online, then the Spondooley storm the next month.

So probably should consider this to be the proverbial lull?

The acceleration of block tends to occur in the last 3-4 days of each cycle when new stuff gets delivered and people hurry to get it online before the next switchover.  I skipped work just to get my BFL SC Single online earlier last year earning me an extra 0.6BTC

As those Neptunes and S3s go online (again muahhahaha) the jump should go higher.  Of course bad luck all around might skew that.

All those neptunes and s3's wont make the network go up higher. You can't add hashrate twice. That's what the recent jump was about. When they sell them and they get turned back on the hashrate doesnt go up again. It's already been factored in.
This chart says otherwise about the acceleration occuring during the last few days of a cycle. Also shows how we are still on track for a 0% increase this cycle.
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/assets/difficulty/bitcoin-difficulty.png

This is interesting. I have been thinking and posting a bit about my feelings that the difficulty will not keep skyrocketing. My feelings are some of the new hash rate is canceled out by old equipment going offline. I also thought the last increase was super high but not being an expert by a long ways I just kept watching. And if the next increase is very small or even slightly negative that would tend to prove the theory of the last increase was shall we say a perfect storm.

Steve

Which I think is the point being made. The assumption is that the drop occurs during the period in which the new miners are being packed, shipped and installed on the customer end. If that is true the its a false drop and very very temporal.

It will be for 10-12 days or 1 adjustment .  most likely  it will be a 4-6% jump not a drop

Ok so the main function of mining is to sign transactions right? So if time between blocks is ten minutes and people doing BTC transactions are expecting those transactions to happen almost instantly the we need either more hashing power or a drop in diff immediately? (or both)

Am I seeing this right? I've seen m's pool monitor predict a drop for the last few days as well, not sure what that is based off though.

his math is based on current block making speed.  

   if blocks are 10 minutes about  +- 1 %

 if blocks are 9  minutes apart    +- 10%

 if blocks are 8 minutes apart   +- 20%


very rough math.

I will give you a second thing to keep in mined diff jump avg from jan 2013 to now = 23%  avg per jump    

But diff jump avg from Dec 2013 to now about 18% avg per jump

Also  I link you to this one:

http://bitcoincharts.com/

  Diff now 16818461371
  Diff est   16669791571


this one:

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Bitcoin Difficulty now:         16,818,461,371

Estimated Next Difficulty:   18,380,239,968



I take                 Diff est:   16,669,791,571

Estimated Next Difficulty:   18,380,239,968


Total--------------------      35,050,031,539  /  2 =   17,525,015,769.5  diff   which is 4.2 percent jump


    Now about 14-15  hours later using the  same method  I get  a 3.6 percent jump

Hashrate starting to rise...blocks back down to 10.1

I think it's unrealistic to expect anything under 18.6 next round.

To far off but under 18 seems possible.  !7.9 is possible

Wanna bet on that?

18.6 is too much. ~10% I say.

I believe he meant 18.6G diff. Over 18 certainly still seems likely. Going down? Not a chance.

Well if mining actually stabilizes it means that we have one of the indicators to a price rise matching
The whole market rate stabilizes and the hash stabilizes leading to a new price boost and an increasing in mining again part of the cycle.
Worth watching either way 

Eh I don't think mining and price are that closely associated these days.  Maybe back in the day.  Unless some miner decides to not buy miners and buy coins instead creating demand, it doesn't alter the price.

Perhaps it is a bit of an older topic 2013 to the extent that electricity prices do effect mining
Old topic on it
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=358257.0

At minimum it does effect the price a bit since you can't argue that Bitcoin would have the same price at a difficulty of 1 as it does at its present difficulty near 17 billion, but your right the margins may not be as large as they once were, adoption and merchant usage are larger factors than before to take its place.

I was thinking about the profitability gap.
Although the blockchain one makes me go ??? needs an update really badly lol.
https://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1jyx2i/well_this_doesnt_look_very_good_bitcoin_mining/

bitcoinwisdoms diff algos rely heavily of the previous change. Thus early on in an adjustment period it is basically saying the diff will inc by the prev amount. Right now my models show 2% increase.

This calls for a *Miner's Dance*!

Make's sense that difficulty has been skyrocketing since I can't really recall how long its just been skyrocketing on every reset lol.

Indeed. We will see a bump next diff increase with the new bitmain miners, but here's to hoping days of >10% increase are over!!

wisdom has us pegged at +5% at the next change. I still think this is a bit high.

btcwise says  =   18,088
bitcoin charts =   16,906
Total             =    34,994 / 2 =   17,497   which is  4.03 percent

I can live with 2-5% increases compared to what we have been getting. I still think a lot of old equipment is getting retired and thats helping the difficulty this time. When the s3 hit en masse it will be interesting to see. I was suprised the knc didn't make more of a difference but i guess since they have allegedly been mining for months with them it would't make a difference if it was true.

Steve

we're at 9.8 min/block which is 2%.

Why do you think there would be a bump when bitmain delivers miners? The miners have already been turned on and factored into the difficulty. You can't add the hash twice.

Exactly how much do you think Bitmain is putting into the future contribution.  Friedcat said he was shipping out 100PH/s worth of chips.  That will be going online sometime in the next 4-6 weeks.  Then there's the Neptunes, and any back alley shady deals BFL may put on.  Bitfury....

I was commenting on what thejuice said.

"We will see a bump next diff increase with the new bitmain miners"

I'm saying there wont be a bump next dif increase because of bitmain miners.

My apologies.  There will be a bump most likely, but it will probably not be from Bitmain.   Either that or Bitmain is getting so many orders they'll be testing more batches  :o

This could be the difficulty increment for the rest of bitcoin life, time to buy asic!!

well eventually if asic's are the best way to mine. the   watt per gh wall will be reached.  for the sake of argument .2 watts per hash  at this point in time growth will flatten off a lot.



in 200 day blocks of time .

 the last 200 days growth was about 18%.

 the 200 days before that about 24%.

the next 200 days growth will be under 18%.

  my guess is 13-15%.

This jump  is at .

btc wise   >>>> 17,656
bitcoincharts>>  16,907

Total >>>>>>> 34,563

Avg >>>>>>>>> 17,281.5    or 2.76 percent jump with 686 blocks to go  or 4.7 days

Well shit... In the bitmain threads they are saying the S3 isn't quite put together yet. That means the current hashrate increase wasn't from them and that there will be a bump once they start shipping them out.

I kinda hope they are lying to us and have been testing the S3's. So who is responsible for all that hashrate that was added recently?

my feeling is bitmaintech.  but not with s-3's.   they may have a lot more s-1's + s-2's.  they underclocked /undervolted them and ran them.

But I am hoping that they just ran the s-3's  and are playing with the truth same as you are hoping.

I also think bitmaintech may have the ability to build far more gear then we realize.  Then store it off line rather then mine it.  

This would be good as it would mean they want the mining game to last for years.

KNC neptunes and asicminer gen3 probably played a role.

Also, according to my snooping at antminer's address https://blockchain.info/address/1QB8Ds5KbGYBLQa5RyDQ2sVUeSKWf7qgkZ it doesn't look like they have sold more than ~5000 S3s so far. This would only increase the difficulty a tiny 2% if everything got turned on at the same time.

We may finally, finally be seeing a plateau!

I think the issue now is the margins on the hardware are quickly dropping and it's just not worth it for manufactures to produce more machines.
 

I agree that diff will flatten .  And sooner  over later.

 take the pattern I use of replacing older gear with newer gear.  looking to get more hash better power decent price.

I am not the only person doing this.

 Now look at gear that does 2 watts per hash. 

And see that all 2 watt gear will not pay for power at a diff of 41 and btc at 620 usd. power at 15 cents.

So all 2 watt gear is going to phase out .  I no longer own any 2 watt gear (well 9 fury usb sticks) 

and I have 1th at 1000 watts and soon to have  s-3's.

My guess is quite a few miners are moving selling shifting their 2 watt gear.   

the 200 days from dec 21st  2013 to july 9 2014  growth is about 18%

 the prior 200 days growth was 24%

the next 200 days growth will be under 18% my guess  stands at 13-15%.

 asics will hit a wall .5 watts or at best .2 watts.  this wall will be reached right around the next halving .  Should be very interesting to see it happen.

  Or will all growth be moved towards LTC/alt coins?

From gpu -> 1st gen asics -> 2nf gen asics each jump was atleast an order of magnitude. Now we are seeing very small increases. Unless there is a breakthrough, increasing by even 50% efficiency will not move the diff.

Replacing could start to play important role when first (least efficient) last gen ASICs start to be unprofitable. Older hardware is not that important - under 15Ph in total. Switching off will be also more of a gradual process than overnight event - I could imagine enthusiast miners willing to pay for mining for at least some time.
I would bet without any breakthrough available chips (incl gen3 AM) should take us at least above 300Ph. Level for plateauing? - who knows.

Btw, last jump <10% was in May 2013, decrease in January 2013.

 

Honest thoughts: I think this is all my fault.

See, the math said two weeks ago that running my turbo jalapenos was no longer profitable at their 5w/gh power consumption. This is due partially to the lower efficiency of running a 5gh unit at 30+gh, along with the water blocks to cool it.

Last Friday I shut down my singles because with the 25% increase without a price boost my Singles were no longer profitable at 4w/gh. I have a feeling everyone else with 65nm class equipment did the same thing.

It is completely illogical to mine at a loss with electricity factored in. Completely and utterly illogical. So I think a number of farms shut down; you can't mine at a bitcoin price below that of the electricity used to mine.

This is why the Monarch chips are interesting; they can mine easily when others have to shut down. Unless you live next to a river or a volcano, this is not something you can get around easily :-)

C

(note: I will be hacking my Singles this weekend to run a lot slower and more efficient. This will help for awhile)

yeah all the above 2 watt gear is  getting turned off.


there is a lot of 2 watt gear s-1's  etc.  when it drops out

  growth will slow  down to 13-15 %.  maybe lower.

I sorta shutdown my bfl 63gh@330watts single when I got my s2 setup recently. The bfl is still on the profit side but its not much. I would probably clear $20 this month after power cost. I was thinking of giving it to a friend or donating it to someone before its no longer profitable for anyone. It has a low serial number 7xx and has been running since last august up until I turned it off. Should I keep it for an antique? Hah

Some people may want to operate at a small loss because mining is a way to get bitcoins without going through an exchange. So you could subtract the fee of what it would cost to buy coin on an exchange and mine at that percentage lost. Using your electricity to buy bitcoins basically.

Running the calcs for an S3 paying .07c/kwh, I could probably run it til 180 billion difficulty at current btc prices. I'm fairly confident btc prices will go up before then so I could possibly run even longer. I'm know I can get a good 3-6 months out of it and maybe longer but its hard to predict what will happen past 3 months from now. Some new asic could get produce and all sorts of other things.

Solar would be a nice option but takes forever to break even. After you do break even you could run everything til the equipment dies.

Looks like more power is coming online now. ?S3s. Looking like 4-6% range.

Remember is a miner shut down 2W gear and they feel the need to completely populate all their electrical capacity they will put new miners online, so while they will take down an S1 they'll put up an S3 in it's place.

Interested in lowering power consumption requirements for my 65-nm gear.  Have you made any progress on this front yet?

Good luck trying to sell 1st gen gear for more than a pittance! If you didn't already do it several months ago, you're far too late. Even S1's are at giveaway prices, nevermind BFL, Avalon and ASICMiner gear. I held too long and have stacks of old miners collecting some serious dust.

The only hope is if BTC price shoots to the sky. The rise to $1200 saw used gear nearly quadruple in value on eBay almost overnight.

Yeah I was hoping that might happen last month then I could dump my Gen 1 miners.  Unfortunately now the miners make pretty much nothing, so that all anybody would pay.  4x$0 = $0 hehe.  Mine are sitting in an E-waste box waiting to go to recycling.

LTC scrypt hype is almost over. If you compare prices of SHA vs scrypt miners the SHA miners are at least at the same profitability level again (for $1.000 you can have app. 1 TH/s SHA or 20MH/s  scrypt hash power, results in: http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/?sha256hr=1000.00&sha256p=1000.00&sha256pc=0.1000&sha256c=true&scrypthr=20000.00&scryptp=1000.00&scryptpc=0.1000&scryptc=true&e=Coinbase).
I smell bad scrypt mining industry crash very soon

Yep! If people thought the SHA ASIC carnage was bad, they haven't seen nothing yet.

Yes, there are other Scrypt coins other than LTC but honestly their only value is based on speculation. The future is PoS coins.

  well off topic a bit but i did start it.  There has been a huge amount of gear sold.  I am extended into these area more then I would like .  I have 55mh in gridseed blades. (11 of them).
I see a problem in alt/coins. 

here it is: gaw Miners and zoomhash sell with pp and cc.  this makes buyers a bit more fearless due to protection of lack of delivery. I see this area of the market flooding with gear. LTC diff is sky rocketing.

Was hoping for bitcoin difficulty to drop too, but unfortunately its dreaming..

Well, you can replace one of the two voltage sensing resistors to drop the chip voltage to .85-.9 volts. Then you can clock down to speed 1 and reduce the power to 2-3w/gh. The other thing I'm working on is removing the 3 top side FETs per power controller and replacing them with two 052ne2LSI's to reduce power loss in the supply stage.

With that you don't really have to run the fans on top anymore, my goal is to cool it with a single fan in the case end. That should lead to a quiet purring single hashing at 30ish gh instead of 50+.

C

getting way off topic but s3 undervolt/down clock really interests me.

I have a friends office where i can fit 2 or 3 s-3's and use up to 800 watts. must run quietly .  I ran 3 s-1's at 420gh and at 560 watts  for 2 months.

If the s-3 lets me go to 400gh at 240 watts I could do 3 and get 1.2th at 720 watts  .  this would be very good . at 3 cents a k-watt

they would run until feb or march with out  going past power cost.

I see spot mini mines as my future  in mining 1, 2 or 3 s-3's in a place with discount power. I have 2 or 3 locations in mind.

The last difficulty increase was a deal killer to many of the people I know who were mining with various miners that were mining with gear totaling 3-4 th/s using more than 3000 watts. They shut down and sold their miners, all of them. I turned off 80% of my mining equipment at the last rise. Nice to see the next jump is not so high.

We need more efficient mining equipment that allows upgrading like the 2nd generation mining equipment had. You could upgrade with the difficulty increase and keep up your ROI with the curve. Now, you have to add too many watts per Th to maintain large difficulity rises. The mining equipment just keeps slamming more chips into a larger form factor requiring more power.

That being said, the network hash rate continues to rise along with difficulty with a decline in daily growth rate. So, miners are still upgrading equipment and adding more hashing power. The race continues....

This probably explains a lot of the initial drop after the rise. Most gen2 hardware is still +ev.

Looks like we are going to have a low single digit increase this time. :)

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
Bitcoin Difficulty: 16,818,461,371
Estimated Next Difficulty: 17,690,934,100 (+5.19%)
Adjust time: After 412 Blocks, About 2.7 days

https://blockr.io/
Next difficulty (estimate)
17,015,651,269.97
1.17% change to current
412 blocks until difficulty changes

        https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty        btcwise says  =   17,691
            http://bitcoincharts.com/                              bitcoin charts =   17,140
                                                                             Total             =    34,831 / 2 =   17,415.5   which is  3.55 percent



So with 371 blocks left still under 5 percent.

What this does for me is help my  bottom line on my dragon miner purchased on april 20.

It is getting close to btc roi.  It has done usd roi due to price rise in btc. 

Meh and the S3 batch 1 sold out quickly.  Oh well, too late to jump on now.  I'm sure if I order 10 now I'll get mine delivered just in time to witness a large difficulty spike when they arrive  :(

Hmm wonder how much that will impact the difficulty in the end
Lot of stuff coming online as usual but at least it was a brief slowdown  ;)

.
Theres not that much left in the pipeline that I know of... the sp30s and the S3s. Am I missing anything

Even if black arrow has tons of chips they are not efficient.  So they are not much to worry about.

Don't think so mostly just a bunch of AM chips moving all over the place to BTCgarden Rockxie and the rest

Haven't heard anything from Bitfury.  Obviously they have money after feeding the beast that is ghash.io, so maybe they have some 20nm stuff they're keeping quiet about?

You never know sometimes those sort of hashrate increases do appear and it takes the network a while to figure it out
But lets enjoy this quiet period while it lasts lol.

No they don't.

with 213 blocks to go:

http://bitcoincharts.com/   >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 17,302

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty  >>>>>> 17,576


total >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>  34,878

avg >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 17,439

current  >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 16,818


predicated increase >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 3.69 percent


So the op's bold guess is still looking okay as it appears this will be the smallest increase in over 1 year.

Remember another factor is it is the summer for more miners then it is the winter.

 No knock on the southern hemisphere.

Just more miners north of the equator.

So if you have marginal gear add in your ac cost and you are over the top.

5 s-1's cranked to 200gh each are 1th at 2000 watts.

that is a lot of heat  about 7000-8000 btu's

I would imagine a lot of miners that have s-1's are now undervolting and unerclocking.

those same 5 s-1's  can go to 700gh and 900 watts  which is under 3500 btus .

I would think that s-1's are more then 15 percent of the network.   

 if a lot are now lowered  that drops the network a lot

Those S1s are approaching negative profit for a lot of miners but I don't think some of the miners are calculating that.  Even if they are they are thinking "well if BTC goes up to $1200 then I should have mined for 2 more months".  They should be thinking "now I'll spend my saved electricity costs buying BTC" or "that S3 looks nice" :)

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty is showing a ~3.2% increase now.

It appears that the rate that difficult is increasing is slowing down, but isn't quite coming to a halt yet.

Well if you figure that until about july 10th of 2013  a gpu could earn enough btc to pay for the power it used.  and at best gpu's did around 300 watts a gh.

last summer gpu's dropped out of the network many replaced by little asic miner sticks.  but 3 sticks = 1gh  and the power was about 7-9 watts   or 300 to 9

power savings.  about 33.33 to one power drop.



now july 12 2014   a s-1 at 2 watts a gh is close to break even.

   buy an s-3     I go from 2 watts to .75 watts   or   2.667 to one power drop

growth will slow.  even if you toss in the price raise of 90 to 630  or 7 to 1      7 x 2.667 =     

18.667     vs  33.33      and it is not fair to  do that  since the price increase was already helping the s-1's

there is no reason for the network to grow at 16% the next 200 days…….


Of course   if price jumps well above the current 630 usd or if a new magic miner with real power savings like  .05 watts a gh come along growth will keep up.

I just don't see power savings ever going much past the .46  watts per hash of the sp30.

 So growth will flatten. Or price will rise a lot.  to keep growth high.

If 16nm tech comes out early next year then we could see another large growth spike.  Going to that size die will surely reduce power usage as well as heat, and then you can again make ROI a lot easier.

If you have cheap power, an S1 can still make ROI given what they're selling for now.  We just brought over 20 of them online and it's a 3.5:2 hash ratio compared to the S3.  7 S1's can be had for 2 S3's which if they're stable at 200Gh/s will net you 400Gh/s more than the S3.  The key is definitely the power usage.  Hoping to make enough BTC to upgrade to some SP30's in September then ride that out and see what next year brings.

if the s-3 can under clock / under volt like the s-1 it will be at .5-.6 watts  .

 say 400gh at 200-240 watt.  it will be better then a sp30

yeahhh
undervolt..

i prefer going at full power, play fast, mine fast, dump fast  :D

and 3.08%  jump just happened.   So put 3% in your calculators and see how good  you miner looks.

My models rock. :)

Next difficulty looks like 7-9% based on expected delivery.

I'll gladly take a 3% difficulty increase to offset that awful 25% increase we just had!

Unfortunately, I think S3s will start rolling off the assembly line by the hundreds so the next difficulty increase will probably between 10-15%.

Depends on what day of the week they ship out and if miners can get them online early enough into this difficulty.  Right now doesn't appear any significant change has occurred since it jumped the 3%.

Unfortunately there's very little that we can infer from the hashrate immediately at the difficulty changes. Over the last year the instantaneous numbers can be overshooting or undershooting at that point. I've been working on an assumption that 13% to 14% is the "norm" and that the 25% was an extreme overshoot. The 3% we've just had is really putting things back to where I'd have expected. By the end of the year I expect we'll be under 10% per diff change but difficulties will inevitably be erratic just by virtue of the way mining stats work.

Even at those numbers, they're close,  but the sp30 still pulls ahead by a slight margin:

400 Gh/s / 240watt = .6  or 400 / 200 = .5
6 Th/s / 2400 watt = .4

Also price-wise very close (hardware purchase only):

11 x S3 = $5027.91 (at $630/1BTC today) / 5.357 Th/s (@stock 487 Gh/s, @550 if possible it evens it up)
$5,095 / 6 Th/s

Stock voltage:
11 x S3 = $5028 / 5.357 Ths / 4Kw
1 SP30 = $5095 / 6Ths / 2.4Kw

Undervolt assuming best case 400/200:

11 x S3 = $5028 / 4.4Ths / 2.2Kw
1 SP30 = $5095 / 6Ths / 2.4Kw

Now, the one thing that's going in the S3's favor is the form factor.  The SP30 is harder for the home hasher to deploy since it's rackmount and it's going to be loud as all heck with all those fans.  For us in a datacenter setting it makes more sense for the rackmount as our S1 deployment is nice but kludgey.

For today tho, it's still hard to beat used S1's if you have cheap power.  Our average cost has been about $160 each, and they're very stable overclocked @205Ghs, so we have roughly 4.7Ths deployed for about $3700.  Only after about 90 days it evens up and the S3's start to pull ahead counting power.

If you take the average of the 3% increase and the previous 25% increase then the total increase for the two periods is roughly the same as if the difficulty increased 14% both periods.

Pretty much. Mining went from 30% increases to 15%. Which stretched out the operational time of my singles for a month or two. Not sure where things will go from here, if the price of bitcoin does not rise, then we will hit a technical limit as to how much money people want to donate to the blockchain (ie: none IMO).

Which will stabilize mining at a level where people can grind out a small profit. Which should be replaced by the damn transaction fees.

yeah, asics are now common.   june 2013 to dec 2013  diff was 24%   jan 2014 to july diff was 18%

 the power efficiency  jumps are less and diff has shrunk a bit.


When I was mining gpu's  back in the day they would grind out a small profit.

 asics are drifting into this.  we will see as time unfolds.

SP30 will be less noisy than the SP10, but yes the datacenter setting is preferred for various reasons.

Hows the hashrate/diff increase looking for this next round?

Not that bad actually the last round went up around 8% and the round before that 3% so its quiet compared to before for a while
The hashrate is increasing but not rapidly at this time looking like a flat round or small increase again for the next round
The last increase was 2 days ago though so its still early in the cycle.
Between 0 to 5% perhaps
http://bitcoindifficulty.com/
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Jul 25 2014   18,736,441,558   8.08%   134,120,673 GH/s
Jul 12 2014   17,336,316,979   3.08%   124,098,191 GH/s
Jun 29 2014   16,818,461,371   24.93%   120,391,236 GH/s

yeah I agree 5 to 10 % this time.

one reason is a lot of gear above 2 watts is being pulled off the market.

the other reason is most miners are doing summer not winter.  so heat cuts down mining.

another reason is new gear is not .3 or .2 watts so it sells but not as fast.

Ah just noticed someone who got that last one spot on 8 was in the middle lol.
Guess I should ask TheJuice when they get back on what they predict

@ Philipma

True enough summer heat makes mining more costly so we might see the rate boom in the winter months and stall for the next few until it gets colder.

I get these two


http://bitcoincharts.com/                                  next diff = 18701.6 with 1836 blocks to go


https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty      next  diff = 19644.3   with 1838 block to go


add them divide them  come up with   19172.9     next jump  which is 2.32%  over current 18736.4


I do this each day  and make my moves based on this and btc prices.


  Diff has show long term drops if you do 200 day periods

dec 21 2103  to july  12 2014 is just about 18%

jun 5 2013 to dec 21 2013  is just about 25%


Simple reasons are asics fully  replaced fpga and gpu   in the jun to dec time of 2013  this meant huge growth due to really good power savings.

from dec 2013 to now 2 watt s-1 becomes .75 watt s-3 and that is  less growth due to okay power savings.

 btc price drop from dec to now also has slowed growth.


next 200 days  .75 watt drops to .4 watts?  = slower growth.

btc price can jack up growth and  maybe someone invents a better way to hash.. and new gear  goes  much faster with better power.


My guess is no. 

 look at gear like a hard drive :


 ssds'   were big jump over hdds' and now we have flattened out in   drive speed increase.

 With  the new  ssds 2x the speed of older ones.  not quite the same but you get the idea.

Thanks I do the same with those charts but just look at their calculation they estimate it at on a daily basis your internal average would put it down to a far narrower measure and be more accurate over longer duration since trends would start to appear.

And your right FPGA's and GPUs are long out of the Bitcoin market and moved to altcoin mining which oddly enough is slowly getting replaced by ASICs as well so the areas of focus are increasing chip concentration 32 mm to 20mm etc and efficiency per watt hour.

Back to Bitcoin the centralization of mining centers is an interesting development that I am watching as the single units become less commercially viable options.
I'm surprised that liquid cooling hasn't yet emerged in larger scales though but that would probably extend the lifespan of mining units over the summer by keeping the heat costs down.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=346134.0
http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XNjk5MTc0MTY0.html
AM has a few of those facilities up so considering the scale increasing as larger commercializations of these central units start to emerge I expect this variance to more or less fade away in a year or two but your right at present the difficulty will slow down and decrease in jumps for a while.

Thanks that was interesting stuff and likely explains this years trendline, the second part I wrote probably covers 2015 to 2016 summer deployments. Chip to Unit direct mobilization.

The clue here as to whether there is a new jump in tech in the wings is that when Bitcoin kicked off there was CPU mining, the potential of GPU mining, FPGA and ASIC miners could also possibly be developed. That is all complete now, with advances of late being improvements in power consumption.

The last thing waiting in the wings is the mythical unicorn of hashing, that of the quantum computer. But that is not on the near horizon.

So is this Peak Hardware we are heading to in the next couple of months?

maybe  but as the Northern hemisphere   heads to fall /winter some offline gear  will come back online.  say 5-10% at a minimum

pretty much. over the next 6 months all manufacturers will be using 20nm tech probably, and undervolting for efficiency, to a peak of maybe 0.25w/GH

Actual increase was 8.08%. Rock on new models.

Next predicted difficulty increase: 4-6%

my simple model uses



https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty >>>> 19285


http://bitcoincharts.com/    >>>>>>>>>>>>>   18886


total-----------------------------------------------------38171/2 =  19085.5    this is 1.86 %

Very interesting. I turn off my miners, difficulty increases collapse.

Makes sense, everything revolves around me of course. But still I do think we have hit a point of equilibrium. The fact that a small drop in bitcoin price is being mirrored in mining power seems to point to this.

Very. Interesting.

It is interesting, but i think it is more related to summer time, when it is hard to keep miners cool.

Well there is the undeniable fact that so far almost every major company has failed to ROI BTC except some early Avalon, some of the Jupiters and Bitmain gear.  People got burned on Cointerra, KNC's private farm killing their new Jupiter and Neptunes profit, and that massive hashfast bankruptcy didn't help. When all the major players for the most part suck maybe people are realizing they need to think before jumping in.

Look at dogie's miner rating thread - pretty much every company gets an F for ethics because of their private pools and premines.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=456691.0

True enough a fair number of high scores but a Failure in the ethics department.
I still get but then again there is no A in that section just a Blank lol.

Ethics?
All companies start with 10 points, and lose points for various infractions. The key is as follows:  
   F     = Operates own mining farm = -2
   FF   = Operates own large mining farm = -4
   P     = Evidence of premining on preordered equipment = -2
   BFL = BFL'ing = -9
   B    = Bankrupt = -9
   O    = Other   generic unethical behaviour = -5
  

BFL'ing a classic  thank you for the laugh!

Funny, but really harsh on BFL. They did deliver the Singles/65nm technology, it was quite good stuff, so their scores should be higher.

I'd also give them serious kudos for releasing the source code and the schematics so tweakers like me could do stuff. No other manufacturer seems to have done that.

C

It's my understand from doing the math that if the difficulty increase is less than 17% then you will profit from joining the cloud mining entity in my sig.  So if really it's only a small increase that would be huge for profitability.  But like others have said you can't get much from day to day variance.

Nothing quite like a good multi-level-marketing scam. :-)

Hmm well opened another Mining Speculation thread but if Asicminer starts putting up the hash it says it will then Bitcoin difficulty might start spiking within a few weeks if not in the next 7 days lol.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=715480.0



Documented history of AM's hashrate for the people who forget those things or weren't around back then.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkPdXsQFT-vIdHRVUjQ5Ql9BQWR6OENLMkhyUktUblE#gid=9

And upcoming interview with Friedcat


So that will be fun for the hashrate lol.

Just in case you thought I got something if someone clicks my sig, I don't.

I do think some cloud hashing sites are total crap and too good to be true (so they probably are) but some seem legit and lay out all the facts, saying you may or may not make a profit.  Those are the ones I would think would be more legit.

I am reserved about that announcement. They have the chips, but putting them to work still requires A LOT of money for PCBs and the rest of the components + money for the DCs setup.

Let's say they have 60PH worth of chips in hand. Considering a low 0.5$/GH cost to put them to work (everything included even the DC) they still need 30M$ for that. Not sure that they have that money available.

We are talking about Asicminer though it doesn't seem far out of their capacity to have that much money lying around for investment and they have the facilities and everything set up from their Gen 1.
Might take some time to convert the chips on hands to miners though but its direct to farm so that's a plus.

They did have quite the haul from 2013 mining and we do have their financial documents from a few months ago so its a plausible deceleration.
Worse bets could be taken
I'm not sure where you get the 30 million figure from though since Gen 1 was made with much less if I recall correctly.
Anyways worth keeping a watch on this for now.

Wow everybody has already forgotten those massive hashrates on BTCGuild last year when AM and Avalon were pretty much the only shows in town (oh excuse my ignorance, Luke did have his Single hashing at BFL's lab).

I'm sure friedcat has the $30 mil available for full development - afterall this was the original crowdfunded ASIC company.  How much miners in total did they end up selling with blades and eruptors and cubes?

 rates are drifting up.  more s-3's are shipping. maybe some sp30's


https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty ----------- 19,670

http://bitcoincharts.com/ --------------------------------- 19,101

total ---------------------------------------------------------- 38,771

Avg ------------------------------------------------------------ 19,385.5

current rate ------------------------------------------------- 18,736


so 18,736 to 19,385.5  = 3.46 percent jump with about 1311 blocks to go

Word has it that Bitfury is also loading up a new massive DC too. And don't forget about all of the other big vendor-controlled DCs that continue to grow and the new private farms starting up every week.

Bitfury has great power prices they have access to very low power prices under 4 cents a kwatt.

So if they run under volted old chips that use 1 watt a gh they are still ahead of the game .

Hey how is this for a conspiracy:

  Putin helps them with power because he wants global warming to accelerate .  His goal is to melt out the ice caps by 2050.  Why is that Russia is a cold weather country and stands to be much less damaged then most of the world when the icecaps melt out.

  The USA realizing this is sending  3 satellites into space they will orbit in a triangle holding a 1 square mile piece of mylar film designed to shade the south pool and prevent Putin's master plan.


This will be the new James Bond Movie for summer of 2015  with huge BTC references and cause the price of BTC to drop then soar.

back to reality next jump set to be about 5 or 6 percent.  comes in about 94 blocks or 14 hours.

we move from 18,736  to 19,700   .


why 5 or 6% jumps   pretty simple.


1)  asics are hitting a power wall seems to be .5watts a hash
2) summertime mining needs cooling
3) btc price close to 600 usd
4) a lot of borderline gear  running at 2 watts so when  you buy new power saving gear you drop the old gear off your grid.  or you undervolt it.  at one time the s-1 was 20 percent of the net work  it pulled 2 watts  so  say the 20 percent was 20ph.  now that  20 ph runs at  lower freq and lower volts say it is doing 12ph  that means 8ph was pulled off the market.

I won't say 20 percent jumps will never happen again  they will.  But only if BTC price makes it worth while.

 my asic breakdowns at 200 day avg

were 25%  june 2013 to dec 2013

then 18%  dec 2013 to  july 2014


My guess is 12%  july 2014 to jan 2015


2 big  factors are btc price stays around 600

asics dont get past .5 watts a hash.

3 tickets please! 1 for the gf and I and another for me to see it again!

  They make that movie I will send them to you fedex over nite.

Looks like a bad luck streak for the network since we only moved 30 blocks in 7 hours.  We should stay under 20 billion easily, about a 4% increase.

And yet again I land squarely in the center of my range. 4.9

Look for a 3.5% to 5.5% increase next adjustment.

What does your crystal ball say about the adjustment after this one?  Or is that the 3.5-5.5%. If so, we can only hope.

yeah these 3 to 8% jumps rock. really help with roi.

my 200 day models are

 25%  june 2013 to dec 2013

18%  dec 2013 to july 2014  

 we  should do 12% july 2014  to jan 2015   if btc stays at 550-650 usd

%5.3  ;D ;D

*This averages the 6/29 fiasco down to %10.34 over the last four increases which is way more in line.

and close to my hopeful 12%

200 day guess.

This is a nice little plateau of slight increases, who knows how long it will last though.  I'm not seeing any huge jumps in hashing power on asics anymore, just more 400gh and 1th models from different manufacturers. Some are just cramming more chips into larger boxes but also doubling the power requirement, so no real gains there. Plus, the huge farms that invested in Q1, Q2, and the start of Q3 still have to pay off their equipment, so I don't think a lot of large farms are upgrading at the moment. Just my guessing though :D

unless prices jumps to 1000 usd really fast or a .3 watt a gh asic comes out.  flat numbers will abound.

I wonder how a game theory specialist would think this through?

This is like an arms race. There is a large (perhaps huge) investment in current generation mining hardware held by the big players.
If difficulty skyrockets, that investment decreases rapidly in value. The big player can stay with declining returns (and eventually retire from the game) or reinvest.  If reinvesting, the player reups for another round of the game. They always face the risk of losing in the next round. This is the same decision a small miner faces.

So at the current difficulty level, the big players have to decide how much to bank and how much to reinvest. If difficulty level increases slow down, IMHO, there is a strong incentive to bank more and reinvest less. Among other incentives, a player might hope to skip an ASIC generation. Similarly, ASIC developers and manufactures face the same question: will I make money or break even on the next round of development?

Another question is when will the flow of fiat funds into the BTC economy going to stop (or at least significantly slow)? The economics of developing new hardware changes as fewer new miners arrive with their initial fiat investments in mining hardware.

We have seen something similar in the post Cold War arms race - weapons advances are much slower and are very targeted - UAVs and survivability among others niche: new versions of guns, tanks and planes are rolling out at a much slower rate..

This was a good article on it that was on reddit and worth a read. https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/felten/game-theory-and-bitcoin/

 read the reddit article .  it is somewhat  dated . it was written in nov 2013.

since then btcguild suffered a confirmed withholding event.  supposed to be accidental .  it did happen and it clearly shows bitcoins  weakness is that a wealthy miner and or pool can attack a smaller pool and kill the luck.

pools have not fixed this.  on any day any pool can be hurt.  more likely a bigger pool attacking  a smaller pool.
.  once again making a solo mined major pool

of which none exist  the only true defense since only the witholder of the block is punished when the witholder makes a block

I suspect that more then one miner has quit mining once they understand this problem.

 Since solo mining and expecting  to hit a block means  a huge investment.

this may be one more factor in mining being slower to grow.

OK, I read up on the withholding attack. Does the bolded statement mean a pool can launch the attack, or individuals supporting the larger pool join the targeted pool and withhold?

I am confused about the distinction between individual and pool behavior.

theoretically both can withold but the pool witholding hurts all its members and the pools luck %. doesnt make sense to do.

but a user with 5% of the pool's hashrate withholding winning blocks will cause the pool to get 5% fewer rewards, but that user will probably get paid out 94.8% of what they would have, while hurting everyone else in the pool and keeping network difficulty down slightly

Doesn't this pose a threat to the network just because we are slowing down? And the attacker will know how much resources to pull to do the attack?

Dollar auction? Queen's race?

Very good observations BTW.

Okay  lets pick the guy with the bad luck soft ware.  It has been proven to exist. I track him down buy it from him.  I now put myself out as a hit man.

 So to speak I live in Washington or Oregon  Or any place with cheap power.  I sub-contract my bad luck system   to pools like cex.io or btcguild or eligus  they trust me the super villain of BTC and  pay me to hit smaller pools with my bad luck gear.

 So I run 100th or 200th at bitminter a smaller pool and  while they have 1200th of good gear they now have 1400th.

  1200 good and 200 bad.  It only takes 45 sp30's to do this or 450 s-3's .  or 200 dragon miners..  do it for a week in a row and the cost is my power.  say  4000 kwatts a day

that is  200 usd a day thats all in power cost.  so a one month cost against bitminter is   6000 in power  and they will have  a 12/14 or

 85 percent luck of normal not 100 percent.. forget the lost btc I know people say whattt.      but the incentive to attack smaller pools is huge.

think of someone with low power cheap gear and the correct software.  he does not need to be a pool.  he could be and individual hired by bigger pools. to attack smaller pools.

Now does he exsist?  I do not know.

Does cex.io attack small pools? I do not know

Does anyone do this join a pool with bad luck gear/software for the purpose of attacking that pool?  I do not know.

But it did happen to one pool BTCguild and  most likely to Eligus pool.  Accident well maybe on purpose well maybe.   I am on many pools.

Sure, but you're not really impacting the pool at all. The other 1200Th of miners are getting exactly the same amount they would if you were not there, you don't contribute 200th you're basically clogging the stats. But you don't change the payouts by one satoshi, the only thing you're doing is making profits for the local electric utility.

Weird way to live, but whatever.

you steal from the pool if you are not found out. since the pool tnimks you mined with 200 th.

so you get 2 shares of the 14 the others get 12 shares of the 14.

and all  miners think the smaller pool sucks. 

No, from what I understand, if you withhold the block you get nothing. You can't turn it in for anything, so it's a complete loss to do it. But I see that if someone else finds a block in the pool you still get a percentage of that, so in a way you are being a less than productive load on the pool.

Hm.

Semantics but your wording is exactly what I am trying to say.  Since I am not big enough to solo mine I use 3 to 5 pools to guard against this danger