What can I do with the "score", I've amassed?
nvm, above answers it. |
|
|
|
Stay far away... read the reviews.
My advice on PSU's: If its not Enermax or Corsair don't buy it. Always remember a bad PSU can destroy your entire computer.
Add Fortron to that list. |
|
|
|
|
To build a rig from scratch, you'll have to put down minimum $300 for peripherals (psu, mobo, ram, cpu, hdd) and then about $200-250 per 6950 (they net around 350mhash). So you're looking at an investment of $500 for 350mhash. That will produce a whopping .25 BTC per day right now. Assuming a steady difficulty and BTC price and free electricity, it would take 133 days to pay back your investment. And then you have price risk, and difficulty risk. In other words, if you want to play with BTC and don't already have the hardware, better to just buy them.
|
|
|
|
Won't the law of supply and demand ensure that mining remains profitable (if just barely)? This is because, if difficulty rises disproportionately to price, so that mining becomes unprofitable for some players, then those players will stop mining, causing difficulty to fall to the point where it is profitable again.
Don't forget miners with free electricity. I fear no invisible hand can prevent them from mining when their employer (or parents/etc.) pays for them. Also, my power is significantly more expensive than in the US, so I'm out first. Again, no invisible hand to help me. That my friend, is the invisible hand. Because it is not profitable for you, you will drop out of the market... |
|
|
|
|
If you want to model this in continuous time inside any given round, here are the parameters:
Assumption: smooth, continuous 50% per round growth rate
Number of blocks generated in current round at time t = 6 * exp(g*t) * t --- g is growth per time, t is time. Working with hours, g = 0.00181. g is derived from simultaneously solving the preceding equation where # of blocks = 2016 and exp(g*t) = (1+per round growth)
BTC/Ghash-hour = 41909/difficulty
With these parameters a round lasts 224 hours, or just over 9 days.
You can create a stepwise function (every 224 hours adjust the difficulty) to find your earnings for any length of time.
|
|
|
|
I don't know what math you use, but by my math 1.146 BTC / 1.57 = 0.73 BTC, unless I'm missing something...
A 50% increase in difficulty is a 1/3 reduction of mining speed. You have to divide the difference between difficulty A and Difficulty B by Difficulty A and then multiply that by the mining-rate in Difficulty A to get the mining rate in Difficulty B (1.379-0.877)/0.877 *1.146 = Your answer. (0.65) I really hope people who are throwing money at mining are capable of 5th grade math You are incorrect. Your method multiplies 57% by the current payout - this would mean that we now get 57% of the blocks we did before in a given time period. This means the mining rate is (1/0.57)-1 = 75% slower, which conincides with a 75% increase in difficulty. Here is the correct calculation: average time = difficulty * 2**32 / hashrate (straight from bitcoin wiki) Hashrate is constant, only variable is difficulty. So in calculating increase in time per block for a difficulty we can simplify this to: delta (avg. time) = delta (difficulty) If difficulty is 57% more, then average time per block is 57% more. So if it took 1 day to get a block before, now it takes 1.57 days. Thus, your payout per day is now 1 block / 1.57 days or .636 blocks/day. Or in our case, payout was 1.146 BTC per day, it is now 1.146/1.57 = 0.73 BTC per day. In the future it'd be good if you didn't insult before you knew you were right... |
|
|
|
Mining just got a LOT less profitable.
1 GH/s used to bring in 1.146 BTC per day. Now it brings 0.656 BTC/day.
BTC are currently trading for $15.50.
So a guy with a 1GH/s rig went from making $17.76/day to making $10.16/day.
Both figures are gross profit, not net profit (after electricity taken out). I used Deepbit's estimator for these income figures; for proportional pools, multiply figures by 1.07. For proportional pools with 0% fee, multiply by 1.10.
Daily income for 5830's is now 0.167 BTC, or $2.60.
I don't know what math you use, but by my math 1.146 BTC / 1.57 = 0.73 BTC, unless I'm missing something... |
|
|
|
I really don't understand anyone who is thinking that early miners had any risk, when its clearly obvious that they were always mining way more vs the current bitcoin price at that time, basically recouping their hardware cost within a month or two.
Hindsight is 20:20. Bitcoin has always been very risky - you don't know if it's going to be around next month (political risk, price risk). It's easy to say now that it was a good idea to mine 6 months ago, but no one knew that for a fact back then. |
|
|
|
Some good points, however i will point out that there is some simplification going on, for example:
"Supply is fixed @ 6.7mil" Well, sorta... but also not really. if all 6.7mil were made available the market would crash like black friday. Fortunately most of the bitcoin supply is actually tied up under the wing of early adopters, who are nicely sitting on it for us. Thanks guys! Next 2000 blocks is actually 100,000 btc, not as small a number as seemed before. Every 2 weeks 100,000 new btc (1.5% of 6.7mil even) are collected and a good chunk of it by people who are looking to SELL SELL SELL, that tends to be what most of the market sees, mined coins by miners who want to pay off their real costing crap.
Aside from that i dont want to quibble with much of your points because my i key isnt working and TOO MANY GODDAMN WORDS HAVE THE LETTER i in THEM.
I think you're confusing quantity supplied and aggregate supply. There are 6.7 million coins out there for the taking - the price determines what quantity of those coins will be sold at any given time. Granted, I haven't put in any psychological factors that may actually shift the supply curve since I'm keeping it very clean, basic economics (which means there are a lot of assumptions built into the model which may or may not hold). I'm also not even going to start building a dynamic model that takes time into account. |
|
|
|
Sorry, but no. It's an equilibrium that sits on those three things (cost for a GH/s of mining power, price of btc in $, difficulty). What we have seen recently is price driving difficulty, but difficulty rising above a certain threshold (determined by a ratio of price and cost of GH/s) can cause rising price to cause an alignment to the ratio (because nothing in the market is making cost of GH/s lower in that ratio). This has happened clear twice as far as I've seen, and is probably happening again with the 50% increase soon.
Explain to me the mechanism behind difficulty having an effect on price. Because I cannot come up with any explanation for it since the same amount of BTC are produced regardless of difficulty. The supply is completely independent of the expense of mining. Just because it's more expensive to mine now doesn't mean that you can get more $ for BTC...
I'm just going to quote from another post of mine where I was talking about the exchange price at $200/btc and $5/btc.
"Something to note is that there is a bit of a difference in demand in these two scenarios. People don't have a demand for btc, they have a demand for the transaction. Let's say they want to use btc to buy a spot troy oz of silver ($36.25). In the first case they need .18 btc, in the second case they need 7.25 btc. Even though the real demand is the same, the nominal demand for btc is higher when the price is lower."
People keep confusing nominal demand for real demand, and I don't get why.
And another thing, an increase in difficulty represents a relative increase in cost to the miner (in both operational and opportunity costs). An increase in costs to the supplier translates into a rightward shifting supply curve. Remember supply is btc as a function of dollars, so higher doller costs means lower btc supply.
You don't seem to understand where prices come from in the aggregate market. I have to first tackle the last part of your post, or what follows won't make sense. BTC supply is not affected by anything - it is fixed at ~6.7 million BTC in the short term and the rate of increase is fixed at ~2000 blocks per 2 weeks (given steady network hash power). The only thing that changes is the QUANTITY supplied, which is a function of price. The supply curve itself does not move (well, moves to the right at 2000 blocks per 2 weeks). The demand for BTC is derived from the demand of doing transactions with it and from speculating (it's not really investing at this point, too risky). There most certainly is a demand for BTC. Any good or service (currency included) has a demand and a supply. Even if people only value the transaction, BTC is needed for the transaction, and thus there is a derivative demand for BTC. Like I said before, price is determined by the intersection of supply and demand. The equilibrium price is the one that clears the market - everyone who wants to buy for more than that $ amount has been satisfied, and everyone who is willing to sell for less is also satisfied. For the price to reach $200/BTC, there has to be a LOT of demand because he supply is fixed. To give an analogy, let's say there is an island that has 100 rocks, which the islanders use as currency. If there are 100 islanders, each one can have a rock on average. If there are 200 islanders, each one can only have 1/2 of a rock. The real value of a rock has increased DUE TO increased demand. This is the exact mechanism behind BTC dollar price in the long run (short run there's all kinds of speculation etc). In your example, the real demand for BTC cannot be the same on an aggregate level. There can be only one price that clears the market (law of one price) for any given levels of supply and demand. Since the supply is fixed, demand must be different in your example. Here's my visual for this, courtesy of MS paint:  Notice that the quantity of BTC traded for dollars depends on the demand for BTC. A move from low demand (D1) to high demand (D2) increases both the quantity sold of BTC and the dollar price of BTC. Difficulty or whatever else variable you want to throw in does not have any bearing on the dollar value of a bitcoin. Everything depends on how much people want to have bitcoins vs. how much people want to have dollars. |
|
|
|
Assuming you mine with deepbit
Assuming deepbit is as 40% of total network capacity.
Assuming another 50 fold jump in price.
Your mining for this last segment of difficulty would be $1,200 or so?
Then assuming another 50 fold jump in price.
Your mining for this last segment of difficulty would be $60,000 or so?
I say get an ATI and keep mining.
Assuming even a 10 fold jump from current prices anywhere in the near future is highly speculative. But hell, if BTC really takes off, who knows what will happen. I mine with my 5850 because I already had it and just came across bitcoin a week and a half ago. Might as well put it to use and get some money back out of it. As long as it's profitable, I'll keep mining (for the summer at least given current difficulty trend and my electric). |
|
|
|
Thats what the difficulty adjustment is meant to do. The inflation rate is kept constant. And thus further proves the point that difficulty has got nothing to do with exchange rates. The supply unrolls in a fixed expected rate. What was meant by 'fixed'. However the exchange rate is driven by demand.
So your thesis is that the fact that it takes $8.6M worth of computer equipment running maybe around 5.4MW to generate 6 btc in an hour has no bearing on the price than if it were just a $100 computer with a $56 card running at 60W. Sounds logical to me! Or maybe, just maybe, it's all related. Let's get causality the right way here. Why is the price of a coin what it is currently (around $15)? Because someone wants to buy the coin for that amount of money, and someone is willing to sell for that amount of money. That is THE ONLY reason the price is what it is. It is the intersection of the supply and demand curves that gives you this price level. Supply is not moving (well, it's ever so slowly increasing) so the ONLY thing that can affect price is demand. If no one is willing to buy at $15, the price of a BTC is not going to be $15, it's going to be something less. The reason that we see difficulty being correlated (note, not CAUSING) with price is that as the price goes up, there is an incentive to enter the market to make money. The cost of the computer equipment necessary to create a bitcoin does not have any impact on the value of a bitcoin - the causality works only the other way around (price determines amount of computer equipment). Or rather, I should say that the expected price of bitcoins is the determining factor, since future price is not fixed. |
|
|
|
There are a lot of people here crying about the difficulty increases, but at the same time all the difficulty increases before haven't hurt profitability. The reason why is because they have been large enough to drive the price up.
Difficulty has no effect on price. A high price will induce people to come into the market, but a high difficulty will have no effect on price. The only thing that drives price is demand, since supply is essentially fixed at 6.something million coins right now. Not exactly "fixed". 7200 new BTC are generated every day. So every 9 days 1% of 6.somethng million coins are added to the supply. Miners are still somewhat a part of the game as they are dropping a relatively large amount of coin to market all the time (whereas the bigboys holding a majority of the coin are sitting on them, like mr. 500,000 bitcoins to be stolen and sold off on mtgox) It's 0.17% of current outstanding amount generated per day right now (about 12k per day currently since we're moving at ~10 blocks an hour). That's why I said essentially fixed - the supply is not shifting at any appreciable rate to cause any kind of effect on price. And in a few hundred blocks difficulty will ramp up dramatically. |
|
|
|
There are a lot of people here crying about the difficulty increases, but at the same time all the difficulty increases before haven't hurt profitability. The reason why is because they have been large enough to drive the price up.
Difficulty has no effect on price. A high price will induce people to come into the market, but a high difficulty will have no effect on price. The only thing that drives price is demand, since supply is essentially fixed at 6.something million coins right now. |
|
|
|
I just did some calculations for the hell of it, assuming a 50% growth rate in computing power (we've seen this for the last 6 months on average).
In a month (6500 blocks roughly given 9 days per 2000 blocks) given the above assumption, your current rig will earn only 30% of what it is earning now in terms of BTC.
In two months, it'll earn 7% of what it is currently earning.
In three months, it's going to earn a measly 1.7% of what it's earning now.
So unless we see a MASSIVE increase in BTC valuation or computational power levels off for some reason, mining will become unprofitable for most people quite quickly.
Must we all play so fast and loose with the truth? 6 months ago there was almost no growth in computing power, then 2 months ago an explosion of computing power. Averaging nearly nothing with something huge to get a middle number is just sloppy. Try going back and looking at the root of why such things would occur. How about you go and look at the charts instead of spouting nonsense... http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ |
|
|
|
A few days ago on here, someone was claiming to calculate the income of a 5830, and he calmly stated what a months' income would be -- based on 877K difficulty!
(Newsflash, bro: that difficulty level expires in LESS THAN TWO DAYS! Sorry to burst your bubble)
So you won't get more than 2 days income at this difficulty -- and then you can't count on 1.3M difficulty either, because that will only last 8 or 9 days...
Those monthly income projections are so stupid. That's why you have people wanting to sell/return their mining hardware -- when reality comes a-calling.
Ok, bra...so whats different about the 5830, or any other card, troll? Now you show up here harping on the 5830. Difficulty increases are across the board, whether the new miner with one 4650, or the super miner with 20 rigs of 4x 6990s. Everyone will be affected the same. Mining for block generation is for the long haul, and correlates with both difficulty and price. Both can go up, and down, Captain Obvious. Efficiency is going to be paramount. You need to have the most efficient hardware / cheap electricity or you will get squeezed out of the market as your rig's running costs will be greater than the BTC you earn. |
|
|
|
|
I just did some calculations for the hell of it, assuming a 50% growth rate in computing power (we've seen this for the last 6 months on average).
In a month (6500 blocks roughly given 9 days per 2000 blocks) given the above assumption, your current rig will earn only 30% of what it is earning now in terms of BTC.
In two months, it'll earn 7% of what it is currently earning.
In three months, it's going to earn a measly 1.7% of what it's earning now.
So unless we see a MASSIVE increase in BTC valuation or computational power levels off for some reason, mining will become unprofitable for most people quite quickly.
|
|
|
|
260 MHash/s with my 5850
That's WAY low, read up on how to set it up properly with flags + OC. I pull 335 on my 5850 with only 845mhz (crappy OCing card). |
|
|
|
|
Non-dedicated mining will become unprofitable this year, given the current rate of hash rate increase.
|
|
|
|
|
You'd have to make it so that there is a decent chance of getting a payout in the beginning, since volume is going to be low and no one wants to just give away money if it's like 1:10^7 odds of winning. Maybe ramp the difficulty with number of users (base it on previous round's buy-ins). Or do it such that if no one gets jackpot, you keep 50% of that round's proceeds in jackpot and divide the rest 50% to people who got some numbers correct. This will keep people motivated to play, and keep the jackpot growing.
|
|
|
|
|
Show Posts
