OK, enough of sourceless statements.

For whoever is interested, here is a rather interesting 3D Bitcoin node world map [http://www.weusecoins.com/globe-bitcoin/].

I was just teasing but bitcoin has to be seen as a global currency not just a U.S. affair, because it is not.

So if the power goes off in the entire US the network harsh rate will collapse. Of course, only Americans are mining for bitcoins. I naively thought this was a global currency but I may have been wrong...

I do not think that there will be any significant drop any time soon, if at all. If only difficulty is going to increase rather sharply (over the next 6 months I would think) once the ASIC start to be delivered.


I would be very surprised if anybody would currently be joining GPU mining. In fact overall network Hash/s rate has been very stable these past months and I would think that there is a lot of "wait & see" occurring right now. Most people are either waiting for their ASIC rigs to be delivered or keep mining before the halving and the ASIC tsunami before committing to ASIC or not. Anybody investing in GPU rigs today would most likely never amortized their investment unless you already have a rig and add few cards to beef up your system. Again, the overall network Hash/s rate indicate this is not the case.


I agree with you that this is very difficult to predict. However, there will be less BTC available, no matter what. Many people actually hoard their BTC when you look at the amount of daily exchange transactions being executed or simply use them for BTC-to-BTC transactions. In theory, price could double rather quickly following the halving. Let see what happen, this will be a very interesting time for bitcoin.

This is assuming that BTC value would not increase following the halving. It is possible but I would doubt this will be the case. In the end, profit is exclusively based on the BTC value versus other currencies. It is very possible that GPU miners will actually be able to make a nice profit prior to the ASIC arrival while the difficulty is still low and the BTC price increases, offsetting the reduction in BTC reward.

Let see, the next few months will be interesting in this regards.

No matter how you twist it though, ASIC will happen.

I agree that the timing may/will be off by a few months but it will happen.

As for an ASIC flooding market, this will exclusively depend of the value of BTC as said in my previous post. On a mid term perspective it should at least double to ~$20/BTC but this would be logical and as many of us realized by now, the market is often irrational.

I thought you were talking about the upcoming ASIC tsunami... How Sandy could affect significantly bitcoin global harshing power evades me but why not, maybe there is a hotspot of mining rigs in NJ and NY.

GPU miners have all the time in the world to sell their cards, it is not like they are going to be irrelevant overnight. The market for these cards ranges from gamers to academics setting up GPU supercomputing and everything in between will not recede any time soon. In fact GPU miners should already have amortized their rig many many times over...

I disagree with these earlier statements. I think that ASIC adopters will, in the end, be the only one hashing away by the end of 2013 if they play their card right by reinvesting judiciously their earnings. Sure, late comer will join the group but this will come at a cost. It is not like ASIC miners are going to drop in price! There is no economic reason this would occur, if only it will go up. GPU mining will be dead as it will simply be impossible to keep up with ASIC rigs for their huge Hash/$/kW. Even if somebody with a large GPU farm would be able to increase its Hash rate 10 fold for free, the electricity consumption would make no sense.

As of today, there will be approximately between 100 to 200 Th of power added to the bitcoin network in the next 3-5 months (this is 5 to 10 times the current network strength with a 3 million difficulty). With the difficulty increasing to at least 10-25 million and the reward halving, the only viable option will be ASIC. Anything below 50-200 Gh/s rig will be irrelevant.

Anyway, while all this is predictable, the BTC exchange rate is not. And this is where the whole story will be decided. In the end, the number of people joining, after the early adopters, will be directly correlated to BTC value to other currencies. If it increases, then you are going to have some very profitable operations and more people purchasing ASIC rigs. If it drops, ASIC early adopters will be the only one mining away until BTC price increase again.

As always, time will tell.

I totally agree with that and this is what makes the most sense indeed. This is the most efficient way to legitimate Bitcoin like it has been for PayPal for example. If this payment option is given, people (most of which have never heard or seen a bitcoin name and logo) will be curious. Combined with some free advertisement/endorsement (e.g. Max Keiser and the like) it will slowly get traction.

At present it is a very small volume currency. To date with ~10 million bitcoin mined at $12 per coin this is only a $120 million market, a drop in the ocean of paper currency (that can be printed ex nihilo) really. Value will have to increase significatively.

As always, time will tell.

There is nothing virtual about bit coin, it is an electronic currency, not monopoly money!