Unless you have free power (and nobody actually has free power), and free hardware (nobody has that either), there is a break-even point where the current value of BTC mined today matches the money expended to get that BTC.
When the majority of miners hit that point, you will see difficulty stop rising. Just look at the time between when GPU mining became mainstream, and when ASICs hit... difficulty actually dropped a bit.
Sure, tech improvements can make ASICs more efficient, but thats a 10% to 20% improvement, not the 1000% improvement that ASICs are over GPUs.
At 1w/GH/s and $0.10 per kwh and $593 per BTC, that break-even point is 124 billion difficulty. Even at 0.5 w/GH/s and $0.5/kwh and $1200 per BTC, that point is still only at 600 billion difficulty.
At 20% increase every 11 days, difficulty will hit 124 billion in 220 days, and 600 billion in 320 days. In reality, most ASICs don't get 1GH/s per watt, so some will be shut down long before 100 billion, leading to a gradual leveling off. In one year, we will probably be sitting at around 100 billion and only 28 and 20 nm ASICs will still be running.
I agree with your idea but not your estimations. Asicminer 40nm chips will be able to achieve 0.2w/gh so maybe 0.4w/gh at the wall. And if AM can achieve that efficiency with 40nm, I think there is much room for improvement with 28/20nm chips. I would guess that we eventually see 20/14nm miners with 0.1w/gh Also there will be large scale mining operations taking advantage of cheap electricity and energy arbitrage and get electricity for something like $0.05/kwh. |
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ASICMiner is the company that made the Block Erupter USB, Block Erupter Blades, and the Block Erupter Cubes. They are working on a 40nm chip now for their next generation miners (which I hope will finally support Stratum directly).
40nm is already on the market on AntMiners.. I thought next gen chips are 28nm ?! BleackArrow also promise since long time ago to come with 28nm chips but all these may come too late when the difficulty will increase too much !! Bitmain uses 55nm. Process size is not as important as optimization. Bitmain/Bitfury 55nm are both more efficient than knc 28nm. KNC 20nm will be less efficient than Asicminer 40nm. |
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ASICminer has 40nm coming,but we have no idea of hashrate & cost per miner....as of yet.I'm watching though  They look to be about .65-.80 watts per GH,MAYBE.so if they come up with a 250GH miner using 200 watts,it'll be a great thing!!! Watch for em!!!!!!!!!!!! Asicminer chips will be 0.2-0.35w/gh and $1-0.5/gh About twice the efficiency and half the price of anyone else. Sorry, I know about AntMiner, Avalon gen, but what is ASICMiner? Is the one sold by BlackArrow? Or who is manufacturing it? Thanks. Separate company. |
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Sorry, I don't get it, this company only sells shares but no miners? What is the goal and activity of this company so that many people buy or talk about shares  I've tried to find and maybe buy their products but all I found on the net is about selling shares and producing nothing?! Am I wrong? Thanks! Yes they manufacture/use/sell hardware and have given more than 200,000btc last year. They have supplied more than 1PH to the network and are about to release next gen chips that will destroy the competition. Read Friedcats post history for more info. |
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ASICminer has 40nm coming,but we have no idea of hashrate & cost per miner....as of yet.I'm watching though They look to be about .65-.80 watts per GH,MAYBE.so if they come up with a 250GH miner using 200 watts,it'll be a great thing!!! Watch for em!!!!!!!!!!!! Asicminer chips will be 0.2-0.35w/gh and $1-0.5/gh About twice the efficiency and half the price of anyone else. |
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Hi, I'm new to bitcoin mining. I am starting with a small budget and thinking about beginning with an X1 from minersource.net. I am wondering if BlackArrow and minersource (authorized reseller) are legitimate.
You're probably better off buying an AntMiner S1 and getting delivery right away. Minersource carries those and posted a pic a few days ago of pallets full of them. The X-1 delivery won't happen until May -- if you decide to go that route I wouldn't prepay at this point -- wait and make your decision then depending on difficulty, etc. To your point, I think other than one prolific poster here, people tend to feel bobsag3 is legit. He's been in business quite a while and does hosting and sales. The guy disparaging him here hasn't turned up any disgruntled customers, just a steady stream of minutia. Thanks. The problem with an AntMiner is that it's $900. I'm on around a $200-$400 budget. Any other good miners or should I wait and see about the X1? Wait for asicminer gen3 devices or wait until blackarrow is shipping prosperos. |
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in 2-3 months (...)
Learn the math first. or maybe you should research stuff before mouthing off - try some of advanced mining calculators which take into consideration difficulty rise - you're looking at jun-july tops, to be in green, after that you will not generate enough to even cover electricity cost. if you got access to free electricity good for you, but most people dont. You are mistaken if you think 28nm chips will not even pay for their own electricity use for an average kWh cost by June. Otherwise the network hashrate would shrink dramatically as even the most efficient chips couldn't even cover their own power costs  I remembered hearing this last September when average difficulty growth was much higher than now and said the same then. 28nm chips will stay profitable until a much smaller fabrication size chips is the majority of the network hashrate. Why the obsession with process node size? Asicminer 40nm will be twice as efficient as bitmines 28nm chips. Basically means there is much room for improvement/optimization left with 28nm chips before the efficiency has reached its limit. |
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You are high on yourself.
You can pretend you were able to accurately predict the difficulty for the past year, but in reality you didn't.
Here's a list of unpredictable variables which influence difficulty:
- value of btc
- manufacturer delays
- manufacturer production costs
- waves of btc noobs
- hardware problems
- hardware performance
- new manufacturers
- private mining farms
Please do enlighten me as to how you were able to predict any of those.
Ignored Point proven. |
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You are high on yourself.
You can pretend you were able to accurately predict the difficulty for the past year, but in reality you didn't.
Here's a list of unpredictable variables which influence difficulty:
- value of btc
- manufacturer delays
- manufacturer production costs
- waves of btc noobs
- hardware problems
- hardware performance
- new manufacturers
- private mining farms
Please do enlighten me as to how you were able to predict any of those.
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See my sig for manufacturer trustworthiness. Antminers are probably the only thing that will turn you a profit.
+1 Accurate comparison But OP needs to do a lot of research before spending more than $60 on an asic. Buy one of those antminer usbs and after a month of mining decide if you want to spend more. *still would never advise spending 30k on mining as there is a huge chance it returns a fraction of what you invest. |
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It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.
False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off. Maybe you were stupid. I always understood exactly what I was calculating. When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so. As for difficulty, My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years. You are telling me you were able to accurately calculate the difficulty growth rate even with a huge amount of unknown variables like value of btc, hardware sold, hardware being used, new asic manufacturers, private farms, etc.. Can I borrow your magic crystal ball? Or did it stop working all of the sudden? Seriously though, why can you not make reasonable estimations now if you could a few months ago when much less was known about the effect of asics? Seriously, I can. Learn to read. It is not as easy as looking at mining earnings only any longer. You must also consider operating expenses now, and the inevitable day when expenses exceed your bitcoin earnings. Con recently posted that he sold off his Avalon because electricity costs more than it earned. That day is coming for everyone soon. Learn to read? What am I doing now? Yes I understand that now (like gpus a year ago) inefficient asics will need to be shut off because they cost more in electricity than they earn. This doesn't take away from the fact that the difficulty of bitcoin was never easy to calculate. You had no idea how many avalons/bitfurys/bitmain/bfl/asicminer were going to sell so your calculations were based entirely off guesses and that has not changed. |
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It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.
False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off. Maybe you were stupid. I always understood exactly what I was calculating. When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so. As for difficulty, My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years. You are telling me you were able to accurately calculate the difficulty growth rate even with a huge amount of unknown variables like value of btc, hardware sold, hardware being used, new asic manufacturers, private farms, etc.. Can I borrow your magic crystal ball? Or did it stop working all of the sudden? Seriously though, why can you not make reasonable estimations now if you could a few months ago when much less was known about the effect of asics? |
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now is a good time
Any time is good if you want to throw away money. |
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It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.
False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off. |
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Bitcoin mining is bad mkay...
plz donate money
thanks
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The LMB website was a quick improvisation due to the exchange issues and not something that represented main focus for Neo.
They have plans for an exchange and we'll probably see a major website overhaul at some point this year.
I would hope they don't start their own exchange. Although impressed with how things are going so far with neo, I was very unimpressed with how the whole bitfunder fiasco was handled. I surely wouldn't put money in an exchange from them if they have proven they cannot handle it. |
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Hmm 13btc inbound. Any ideas where that is coming from? I thought we were only expecting the magic 25 from block rewards
That most likely means that someone started franchising at the difficulty change a few days ago, makes sense. My guess as well. Although this would assume they had plenty of extra gen1 chips to basically test the datacenter with before swapping it with gen3. Since the immersion-cooled datacenter will house 1ph I think franchising could be another 2-3ph + 1-2ph for asicminers other solomining farms |
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Altcoins are only more profitable for a short period of time so it is pointless.
Unless you are using an autoexchanging pool or trading yourself but that is a lot of extra work/risk.
I'd just stick to mining btc.
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A simple question is why would large Asic companies rent hashrates when they can mine for themselves and make more money?
Unless the people buying the hashrates are paying more than it is worth? But im sure the average person could calculate that??
Few reasons: -manufacturer would need an absurd amount of electricity to power any significant amount of asics. -people buy hardware for more than it can possibly mine. -mining is extremely risky. Selling hardware is easier/faster/more profitable. |
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I predict 0.002btc/gh in the future. Twice what a gen3 asicminer will cost.
Also the value will surely go way down due to the havelock bitcoin difficulty derivative (where you can rent gh or speculate against mining).
Speculators will be more than happy to sell you gh on havelock for much less than cex.io is charging. Reason being that speculators are willing to take a much lower profit (still more profitable than mining).
Cex.io is making bank off noobs and their hashrate is evidence of that.
So where besides CEX can a technically challenged noob like me participate in mining? Why do you want to participate in mining? 1) "To make money" - Answer: Don't mine Bitcoin. 2) "Because it's fun / interesting" - Answer: Learn how to set up your own mining machine (for scrypt-altcoins ideally). 3) "To help protect the network" - Answer: Cex.io already has the hardware, you're just buying a mining contract from some other trader and aren't adding to the protection of the network. +1 Mining isn't something that anyone with a big stack of cash can throw money at and get more money in return. To profit by mining you need to know what your doing which takes time/experience. I've been watching/participating in the mining game for over a year now and I still expect to NOT make a profit. If you are a noob and are driven on making a profit I would suggest considering investing in asicminer. They know what they are doing (having invented asics) and can obtain hardware for less than the average joe can. Also with gen3 sales they will be seeing profit much more than mining alone. If you are a noob/pro who thinks they know the mining game you can speculate with the bitcoin difficulty derivative. It's basically cex.io but when difficulty changes, the left over btc is given back to speculators (since divs are now lower due to difficulty thus requiring less btc to pay them) Since your question was how can I participate in mining I assume profit doesn't matter. That being said I would just buy a ~$60 miner (bitfury/bitmain) so you can mine without a huge risk since any money you spend on a miner will likely never come back. |
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