Hope you are found out and fired. This is the reason why the price is so low. If all people competed evenly, then the price would be higher than currently but when some idiots like you get "free electricity" they cause the price to fall as they can afford to sell lower than the ones paying for electricity. Result : most of the miners paying get out due to such a low price and we are all screwed as the ponzi collapses.

I have a 5570 and can do 200+ Mh/S... Unless a 92% means something different now, there is a problem somewhere.

I said the average is 15c which is true. It costs me 8.5 cents so people do live below the average. You and I are in the minority hence why I said 15. For the average American it still makes sense to mine.

Just to prove you wrong some more. Ill use the same calculations as before except switch 15 to 19c a kwh.

it requires 91 cents per day to run a 5830 at 19c per kwh
160.68/91=$176.51


You make .1867 bitcoins a day with a 5830.

(.1867*6.5)-.91=30 cents per day if you sell today

That's completely wrong. Let's take one of the most inefficient cards when it comes to electricity the 5830. A 5830 at most requires 200 watts and at the current diff it mines 0.1867 BTC a day. That means it would take 160.68 days to reach 30 btc. Using the average electricity cost for the united states which is 15 cents per kwh it would cost $115.69 dollars not $200.

If you use a more efficient card on electricity it would be even lower. If your electricity costs less then 15 cents per kwh it will be lower.

Get your facts straight before you start spewing bullshit.

For me  equilibrium is about a month away. Do I plan to sell my cards, with that much raw computing power I can think of a few other projects to use them for in small bursts, not 24/7 like they have been. Maybe even play a few games, without worrying about the drop in hash rate.

Here is the guts of a post I was going to make when I noticed this thread and instead of posting a new thread with a very confusing title of "Sky rocket or go Magma diving ?" I decided to add to this thread ..... they are both ultimately about your own personal equilibrium day.




Sorry for the poor beginning, I always seem to start my posts at the middle and work my way towards the beginning and finally get to the end.

Cost of Electricity per Kilowatt hour unit for me $0.25 (fixed)
Power used by my rig per day (about 220W x 3 + misc) circa 750Watts (24*0.750*0.25) = $4.50 (fixed, unless I add more hardware)
Hashed by rig per day on average 1300MH/sec @ current difficulty of 1888786.70535 is 0.692 BTC.

Assuming that 1 BTC is currently worth about $10 this would be $6.92 mined per day. Great news for me, I am printing money, at a profit using the current exchange rate.


If I assume that the value will increase in the future, I could print at a loss today for a possible profit tomorrow.
Or I could assume that BTC is a bad techo/nerd/geek/investment fad and the value will suddenly drop through the floor, and that I am printing money for a loss today and will be hit by an even larger loss tomorrow.

But I am an optimist and am reminded of that old saying "Always buy land, there ain't any more of it coming along any day soon", that is of course unless you live in Hawaii
But if you bought land 100 years ago, there is one thing for sure and that is that it will have appreciated in value. And if I bought land today, in 100 years time it will also have appreciate in value. In between there are ups and downs but overall the value it is up. I think of BTC in the same way as minerals, there is a limited fixed supply. There are ways to get more minerals, by bring them back to earth from space, but the extra mass would slowly spiral our planet into the Sun.


So anyhow back to the task at hand lets work backwards. i.e. At what difficulty will the cost of electricity for me  match the BTC being printed per day (at given exchange rates) ?



I have one constant the cost of electricity and two variables: the BTC generated per day on average and the exchange rate of BTC to dollars.
So to balance both sides of an equation I need to reduce the BTC generated per day to match my electricity costs.

$4.50/$10.00 would be 0.45 BTC per day to be operating at no loss and no profit. Or one 50BTC block found on average once every (50BTC/0.45BTC) 111.111111 days (111 days, 2 hours and 40 minutes)

Now here comes the flaw in trying to work out the magic difficulty, this duration of 111.111 days is larger than 14 days, which is the target duration of each new difficulty level (probably closer to 12 or 13 days in reality).
There is also a flaw that the future exchange rate all the way during the total 111.111 days will be constant and at today's assumed exchange rate of $10.00

Even with these two major flaws in the calculation both of which are unpredictable (BTC exchange rate and future difficulty growth[reduction] rate). Is having a flawed number better than having no number ? I would like to see a bad approximation rather than nothing.

The maths is trivial - see https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty#How_soon_might_I_expect_to_generate_a_block.3F I'm just flipping the formula to get a difficulty instead of an average time for a new block.

difficulty =  ( average duration for a block in seconds x hashrate in hashes per second) / 2^32  = ( 9,600,000 x 1,300,000,000 ) / 4,294,967,296 = 2,905,726.433

In my case a difficulty of 2905726.433 at a hash rate of 1.3Ghash/sec would yield one 50BTC block (ignoring block fees) found on average every 111 days, 2 hours and 40 minutes or 0.45BTC per day over 111.111 days (or a 54% increase from the current difficulty). This is as I mentioned assuming a constant exchange rate of $10 and a constant difficulty for 111.111 days of the 2905726.433 difficulty. 111.111 days divided by 14 days is 7.9, so the difficulty should have changed at least eight times during this period. But there is no way to know if the future difficulty will increase or decrease in the short term. In the long term it should increase, with increasingly more efferent future hardware.


Anyhow there is a decision that I will need to make, circa a month from now. Nothing is set in stone, the BTC exchange rate could sky rocket, or go magma diving. And the difficulty rate could increase (or decrease) more rapidly than expected. There should be enough information above to help you workout your own approximation to your own personal equilibrium day.

EDIT: Actually in about a months time it will be getting close to winter where I live, so maybe I will continue to mine for subsided heating. *evil grin* Maybe next spring/summer you will see a drop off in mining, but I think that every winter there will be an increase. Why generate heat without doing something useful to make the heat.

There is an interesting idea, electric BTC radiators. Increase the hash rate to increase the temperature, and throttle the sharerate to lower the temperature. Maybe pulse it 5 minutes generating then allow it 5 minutes of idle, and adjust the on/off ratio to adjust the average room temperature. It would definitely be an idea that would get media attention. Although I don't know if it would be in a good way, or a bad way.

Anyhow here is a simple table, everyone loves tables, well except those who love graphs, bloody hedonists.
The top row is cost in US cents per KWhour of electricity and the first column is the BTC to US dollar exchange rate.

You are either ON the table or OFF the table. This is because "average duration for a block in seconds x hashrate in hashes per second" is a constant for everyone mining. So if you are mining less than the required number of BTC's a day to break even you can not be on the table above. So in my case I am mining 0.69 BTC per day (1.3Ghash/sec) and my electricity cost is 0.45 BTC per day. If I was CPU mining at 10MHash/second generating 0.01 BTC a day with the same power cost of  0.45 BTC per day (or anything greater than 0.01), even though I could read values from the above table, I would be asleep probably in deep space and would definitely not be ON the above table. My current exchange rate ($10 per BTC) and current cost (18.75 cents per hour) of electricity would be there and point to a cell with the difficulty equilibrium answer if I was mining sensibly.

So My rig uses 750 watts per hour or 0.75 KW hours at 25 cents per KW hour unit. Thats 18.75 cents (0.75*25) , the 20 cent column is the closest to my true value and at a current exchange rate of $10 would give the approximate value of 2724118 for 20 cents but if I adjust this (20/18.75*2724118 = 2,905,725.867) I get the same value as above, or as close as makes no difference: 2,905,725.867 instead of 2,905,726.433

...or you could mine even if the price went under $7... just waiting selling off until a higher price.
if the price is under $7 for a longer time, the difficulty would even be lower.

There was a recent announcement about using virtual currencies to purchase tangible items - though the Chinese people tend to ignore any government announcement and just immediately take advantage of any obvious loop hole (ie just send someone cash for their virtual currency) - most people in China don't even pay tax becasue there are so many loopholes in the system. The irony is that if you don't piss off the politicians by doing something political, the Chinese are the economically freest people in the world (I know people in China who literally own a mountain, and they've never paid a penny of tax on their income).

Is there anything we can do to help? Can you show us a typical result of what happens, perhaps a screenshot? ...to help me think of ways round it

Oh, I know that.  By 'we don't need miners' I mean we don't need hoards generating bitcoins for little to no profit at current prices.  There will always be miners out there mining with very cheap or 'free' electricity, so transactions will always go through.

The hash rate has barely risen over the past few weeks so it seems we're well past the moment where GPU mining is attractive.  Next up is FPGA mining, assuming someone puts together an attractive package.

I'm currently mining about 150 Bitcoins per day on my Core i7-920.  It costs me approx $1 per day in electricity to leave my machine on and Bitcoins trade at $.005 each. So I'm getting about $.75 worth of Bitcoins per day for a $.25 per day loss.  Screw this.  It's not even worth it  I'm out.

Peace,
Early adopter

The last guy (group) that I know of that scammed and ran, had a name, a physical office, an address and definitely phone numbers. Didn't stop them from closing shop prior to a long public holiday and disappearing with unpaid for goods from various vendors.

There are people here who offer money to people to register prepaid phone numbers for them, some are then used by illegal moneylenders and such.

Then there's an entire industry for registered offices and shell companies which provides persons as shareholders and directors as well as physical offices and somebody to answer phones.

Sorry but just because somebody provides "real" contact information doesn't mean anything if they are out to scam.

While there might be technical solutions to make it harder for fraud or accidental losses, the fact remains that usually the weakest link in any security system is the user. The trade off between convenience, anonymity and security means nobody will use bitcoin for anything if we really want to make it totally secure and user-proof (although I'm reminded of the joke that nobody can foolproof anything because Nature/Evolution can always make a better fool)

The only real solution is to spread the risk, and don't be so silly as to put more funds than necessary into any transactional account. This applies even for real bank accounts. Personally, I refuse increases in credit limit and never put more than necessary for expected online transactions in a debit card account. So anybody who gets steals the cards would only be able to get away with a very limited amount of credit/cash.