For what it's worth: 74/74.3 blocks in/expected. BTC price: $55440.

So you are suggesting that there is some kind of "hash shaping" being done on a large scale that presumably benefits somebody by capturing more blacks during the first 25-30% of the epoch? That's an interesting possibility.

Just as a reminder to folks, while 1% increases are way better than 5% increases, it is still exponential growth, it's just that the exponent is smaller. It works out to a pretty impressive growth rate of 30% per year. If you could get a 30% interest rate on you savings account you would be very happy.

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Into the home stretch for this epoch (1803 blocks completed). BTC price now well above $50K at $51,673. Projected difficulty increase is at about +1.3% on Friday afternoon.

Except for the references to 2017 and 2020, I'd swear that I saw very similar discussions when I started with BTC in July of 2013. The question right now is how long does the current Bull run for BTC price last, and what does it fall to when it's exhausted?

A little past the halfway point at 1062 blocks, and we are roughly 31 blocks "ahead". Based on cryptothis, that translates to a 2.4% to 3.1% increase by late mid-day on Friday.

BTC price is still good at $47,976. The bubble continues to hold, but not inflating much.

Roughly 500 blocks in and price is at $47845. Project next diff is in the range of 3.9% to 9.3%.

Price of BTC continues to amaze me!

To find out more about current mining manufacturers, you might want to consider posing your questions and reading what you can in the various posts in the Mining -> Hardware  sub-forum adjacent to this one. There is significant overlap in folks, but it's not 100% and you might well find additional response.

Best of luck.

While it might be interesting, I am not aware of any current generation mining hardware that readily accept a change from air to liquid cooling in any reasonable way. All the current generation hardware has many dozens of chips spread across 2-3 boards. Each chip usually has a heatsink stuck to the chip. The past generations actually used glue which made it difficult if not impossible to remove the heatsink. I expect the current generation is constructed similarly, though somebody that has actually dismantled one would confirm or refute my claim.

The mining hardware of today does NOT have a small number of large chips for the actual SHA-256 calculations. It's all about parallelism, both within each chip and then across the board. I'd be stunned if Bitmain (for example) would have any interest in producing a variant of the mining board with a liquid cooling plate instead of a heatsink per chip.

I assume you were talking about some kind replacement for heatsink when you mentioned liquid coolling, or did you have something else in mind?

While the price is still good at $37589, it looks like likely difficulty increase is been creeping up for the last couple of days:

1892 blocks completed, about 43 ahead of expected. This puts the likely increase at roughly 2.5%.

At about the halfway point (921 blocks completed), difficulty projection is just shy of 3% using cryptothis. Even more striking though is that BTC price just popped above $37K (again).

BTC price never fails to entertain!

An Avalon 841 will run on 120V with 1-2 ATX Psu's that run off 120V. They are moderately loud and will burn about 1150W at 13+ TH/s. The Goldshell HS1 device mentioned above is strictly a "Hobby Miner" in the vein of small low power miners like the R-box.

The days of 120V mining are over for the majority of folks these days. 

Less than 5 days out, and it looks like the difficulty will increase, though less than 4% if the current rate holds.

Current BTC price: $35701

Bitcoin never fails to disappoint in terms of price for 2021. Just this week alone I've seen it range from $32k to just under $40K.

The FOMO on price as awakened my Avalon 841 from it's year long slumber. Damn the electricity, full speed ahead.....

Your coinbase balance will now be a little less scary (as is mine). As of 2:54PM CT (in the USA):

BTC: $37482.

I don't know if this is transient or not, it's just a bit surprising given the relentless trend upward of the last 3 weeks or so.

Just saw a BTC price of $11,111.12 on Coinbase. This was just off by $.01 from an earlier comment by Phil. Made me smile so I thought I would mention it here.

Zoomed right on past $10K to $10280 at this time. It will be interesting to see if that will hold or if the "magical" $10K price motivates folks to sell.

I'll add my two cents to the discussion on the current ASIC pricing, BTC price, and difficulty. While I agree with Phil that the industry can't support the combination, that doesn't mean that won't continue. Round #1 of crazy investors buy gear from Bitmain at whatever Bitmain is asking. After some months bills come due, and the venture figures out that it isn't going to fly. They sell their gear at a major discount to the original price to Round #2 or somewhat less crazy investors. The round # 2 folks might make it, BTC price might go up, or after several more months, the Round #2 guys throw in the towel. They then sell what gear is still working at a discount to their cost to the Round #3 guys. Eventually the price of that once new gear has now gotten down to a more reasonable price and the Round #N guys are able to continue for a while. The various investors in first few rounds take a loss, which is essentially "paying down" the original price of the hardware.

I think eventually the push back up the chain to Bitmain happens and they drop the price. Hard to tell at what point, if ever, their costs for developing a new generation of gear becomes too high.

All of this happens within the context of difficulty changes, and BTC price changes. But nobody doing actual mining can actually get rich for very long. Something will adjust to essentially negate their advantage over time.

This overall process seems to be repeatable for an indefinite period of time. If for some reason BTC won't rise enough, then the hash rate and difficulty will have to adjust downwards to support whatever the rest of the industry is willing to provide in terms of blockchain processing.

Just out of curiosity, has there ever been s stretch of 507 days where difficulty has NOT risen, much less 700 or more days?

It seems to me that as long as BTC price trades within a small range (say roughly $9100), it will take gear that is lower priced to replace less efficient gear. Most of the hash rate will move to the most efficient producers which include gear efficiency and electricity cost. Hig priced electricity pretty much precludes any significant mining in those areas, even with massively efficient. An upswing in BTC price will also push hash rate and hence difficulty over time.

The whole combination of BTC price, difficulty, electricity cost all come together to make the most efficient mining operations produce a SMALL profit. If they were to make a large profit, then others would join which pushes up hash rate and hence difficulty. Gear vendors can only charge a premium on more efficient gear for a while until thing settle.

There is no long term plan to make big profits with BTC (IMHO) mining. It's only done on the margins and for a short (i.e. a few months maybe) period of time. After the system will settle, with possibly a slightly different set of marginal profit makers. Folks with high electricity cost are effectively unable to mine.

Well over halfway through the current epoch, witch a SMALL decline in difficulty predicted.

BTC price certainly isn't going to push difficulty: $9300/BTC