Very soon, a block will equal only 25 BTC and IMHO, due to principle of supply and demand, US$ per BTC has nowhere to go but up.
That said, the exchange rate is very volatile due to speculation/hoarding and should a large sell-off occur, the sell-off could feed on itself and the exchange rate could collapse.
Just my 2 cents.
BTC is still inflationary by definition as the supply is constantly increasing. If the demand is low enough or the supply high enough, block reward will have no impact on the price of the coin. If the block reward is 50 BTC and people on average only spend 5 BTC, the net amount not entering the market per day is 45 BTC (people can afford to hoard, as their GPUs have high resale values or other values, such as use in gaming). If you have ASIC miners who mine a 25 BTC block and spend an average of 20 BTC a day, the net amount not entering the market is 5 BTC. That is to say, the intended contraction of supply is not a rule from the halving of the block size but is dictated by the behaviour of the miners. I'm hedging my bets on speculators thinking that the price is going to skyrocket so they pour money into it, only to have the market collapse in on them when trust among miners with massive amounts of ASIC mining power collapses and they try to sell the BTC they have as quickly as possible. Hoarding only works to increase the price if everyone is doing it, and ASIC investors tens of thousands of dollars into this will have no choice but to dump heavily when the price starts to fall, for fear of not being able to make a return on their investment and not being able to resell their BTC mining hardware. We may see a spike in value before and for a couple of weeks with the massively increased hash rate (the same thing happened in 2011 during the summer when GPUs began to massively mine), but likely a collapse will follow of an even greater magnitude than that following the 2011 tanking to $2. In the long term the price will rise again, but profit will be lower. This exact same pattern occurred with litecoin when GPU mining became widespread, as the chain was originally thought to only be CPU minable. |
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I think it will drop the price as people who purchased Asics, which only have a practical use as a bitcoin miner, will try to dump as much btc for cash as they can to repay their bitcoin mining investment. Subsequently btc mining profit will drop from where it is now and competition will be fierce.
A lot of people are thinking the opposite, but I see no reason that ASICs would decrease supply while increasing demand., thereby raising the price.
Putting my money where my mouth is, I'm investing heavily in litecoin whose algorithm is designed to be difficult for FPGAs/ASICs and which uses much more power than bitcoin to mine with a GPU.
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I disagree the assumption you seem to make that it will be a significant percent difference this year, maybe by next year
5970 is still THE HIGHEST HASHRATE Card out there
You think in 6 months when we're all using ASICs that a 5970 will still sell for > $200 USD? yeah. IF ASIC's are in use. if not, still worth around 250-290 3 different companies are supposed to release their ASICs within the next 6 months. It'll happen. 7770 gets 200kh/s at 70w too mining LTC |
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i hope for $1299 it's bigger than that.
so they have like, just over 2 weeks to release it for october 1st, and 1 month and 2 weeks before it's considered late!
They already said it's not coming until november |
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0.94 amps? Geez the fans in these cards use 12W
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Are they still going for 38BTC? That seem kind of steep considering ASIC is coming out soon.
Soon as in October or November or December or January |
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Try this reaper litecoin configuration: host yourhost.com
port 8344
user xxx
pass xxx
protocol litecoin
worksize 256
vectors 1
aggression 20
threads_per_gpu 1
sharethreads 32
lookup_gap 2
gpu_thread_concurrency 16384 I got this from some Russians, they use 64 * (memory bus size) for the gpu_thread_concurrency ... I gave that a try and got 490-500 khash. This is with 1130mhz core/1200mhz memory on two 7870s and the computer is absolutely unusable (due to the high agression). This is the config i typically use.. and I get 615 khash with it and the computer is perfectly responsive (with 99% gpu utilization).
worksize 256
aggression 12
cpu_mining_threads 0
threads_per_gpu 5
sharethreads 18
lookup_gap 2
gpu_thread_concurrency 6400
You should be able to get more kh/s mining ltc than you get mh/s mining btc. As I said, a 6870 should pull 350kh/s+ easy. I get 550 kh/s on a 7950. You do have to wait a little while for reaper to reach the correct reported hash rate too, it took me about 6 minutes before it stated 550 kh/s. |
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LTC <-> BTC market is very illiquid.
It has enough liquidity for someone only mining a couple hundred LTC a day... large scale operations will probably find it hard not to disrupt the market price. |
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Yay, i pointed my miners back there.
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I went ahead and tried what you suggested and this is what I got.
[2012-09-11 22:52:26] Probing for an alive pool
[2012-09-11 22:52:26] Long-polling activated for xxxxx
[2012-09-11 22:52:33] Maximum buffer memory device 0 supports says 524288000, y
our scrypt settings come to 0
[2012-09-11 22:52:33] Error -61: clCreateBuffer (padbuffer8), decrease CT or in
crease LG
[2012-09-11 22:52:33] Failed to init GPU thread 0, disabling device 0
[2012-09-11 22:52:33] Restarting the GPU from the menu will not fix this.
[2012-09-11 22:52:33] Try restarting cgminer.
Press enter to continue:
the exact batch file I used was (after xing out credentials):
cgminer -o xxxxx -u xxxxx -p xxxxx --scrypt -g 1 --shaders 1280 --thread-concurrency 16000 --worksize 256 -I 13
Right, sorry. There's a bug with cgminer right now that I wasn't aware of because I'd been using a 7770. For some reason thread-concurrency values above 8192 cause the program to crash, which is what is needed for you to achieve a solid hash rate on cards with more than 640SP that are 7xxx series. Once this is fixed, the program should run better. Try this reaper litecoin configuration: host yourhost.com
port 8344
user xxx
pass xxx
protocol litecoin
worksize 256
vectors 1
aggression 20
threads_per_gpu 1
sharethreads 32
lookup_gap 2
gpu_thread_concurrency 16384 I got this from some Russians, they use 64 * (memory bus size) for the gpu_thread_concurrency ... |
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uh, where is the pool? you guys still have a bunch of my btc
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so is it a good or bad idea to buy a 7970 now?
i don't want to use it for gaming only mining..
If its mining only, then it is a bad idea. Full stop. I just bought a bunch of 7950s to mine. As soon as the difficulty goes high enough they will be switched from BTC to LTC. I'm not worried. |
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Buying GPU now could be very risky for very little potential profit. FWIW, I bought 7950s a week ago for a large mining rig to mine litecoin. While bitcoin may quickly move to ASIC mining, litecoin is unlikely to in the near future and has been profitable for me to mine for the past 10 months. I'm hoarding all the LTC I can right now because I believe as soon as ASICs come to dominate bitcoin the value of LTC will increase by an order of magnitude or more. |
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No. It's more like 50.000$ per lot (=50 wafers).
At least this is what I can remember when working for a semiconductor manufacturer (ASICS). But that's 20 years ago ... I'm an old fart now.
Values like these and the retail values of GPU/CPU dies on these technologies are where I'm pulling it from. From a wafer I think you could expect ~200. From a $2000 150mm wafer you would get ~200 100mm^2 dies, of which 70-80% may be usable or a yield of 150 usable dies. This is $13 each to the company producing the ASICs, who would presumably need to test them for fidelity and mark them up before sending them off to BFL/whoever, plus assembly, R&D and whatever else setup overhead. It is presumed that BFL would be ordering these wafers by the hundreds. See more here: http://smithsonianchips.si.edu/ice/cd/CEICM/SECTION7.pdfhttp://www.overclockers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=550542 |
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Based on the 130 nm technology in the paper there there (as far as I can tell the only real experimental data) and the clock rates they've given, you'd be looking at 6 GH/s with a TDP of ~90 W (100mm^2 die) considering how much space the hashing unit in the study takes up on the die. That'd be 66.7 MH/s/w. At 65 nm you're moving to maybe three times the efficiency (real life examples: AMD K8 vs. early Core2Duo), or 200 MH/s/w. Hence, you should NOT be able to achieve 700 MH/s/w without moving to 32 nm or below (even then it's likely below 700 MH/s/w). As I've said above, even Altera themselves have stated that the ASICs produced from their FPGAs are not more efficient than the FPGAs by an order of magnitude. The likelihood is higher that BFL's SC mining ASICs will perform somewhere in the vicinity of 100-200 MH/s/w. Why do you think that BFL hasn't been talking about power consumption up to now? Probably because they know it's unlikely they'll deliver to the hype of their rumours. Cost to produce a 100mm^2 die on 45 nm technology that gets an estimated 15-30 GH/s at ~200 MHz is also probably $100-200. Likely the reason in that study that they couldn't be clocked higher is incredible power consumption/heat dissipation. |
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1. jalapeno will not be only USB powered
2. FPGA's use 45nm (or lower) technology and hardcopies of that also
=> they will probably use an altera hardcopy as the current models are based on altera FPGAs.
But the power problem remains. The hardcopies are apparently not more power efficient. This would question the idea of providing a Mini Rig SC as it would consume 40 x 1kW [if it would be based on FPGAs ... and if hardcopies consume as much power].
If Altera HardCopy is used it will be on 28nm, with a maximum of 11.5M gates, or a maximum hash rate of 12.35 GH/s at 1 GHz, but these run at 400-700 MHz typically. If this really is the case, the power usage will not be much less than the corresponding ASIC. Altera themselves state, "Average of 50% performance improvement over corresponding FPGA, average of 40% less power consumption compared to corresponding FPGA." Thus, from a hash/s/w standpoint, the ASIC would be about 200% greater than the corresponding FPGA. A by-hand design like that of CAST's ASIC would be the only ASIC able to really deliver the kind of power consumption BFL has been hinting at. |
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Anyone used logmein?
Hells yeah! I vastly prefer LogMeIn over TeamViewer. i use logmein, super easy, and can remote power on as well |
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The Jalapeno's coffee warming ability is kind a secondary focus and of efficacious it might be is somewhat dubious... but it will hash, oh yes.  As far as power on the singles go, we are going with a different power brick, but your old ones should still be compatible with the new units. Can you tell us what process you're using for these chips, eg 90nm SOI? |
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