Yeah, I think all of us that are below 17% are out of luck:

Bitcoin Difficulty:    120,033,340,651
Estimated Next Difficulty:    142,421,502,157 (+18.65%)
Adjust time:    After 174 Blocks, About 23.7 hours
Hashrate(?):    1,083,756,870 GH/s
Block Generation Time(?):    
1 block: 8.2 minutes
3 blocks: 24.4 minutes
6 blocks: 48.9 minutes
   
Updated:    1:40 (7.3 minutes ago)

BTCQuote: $373

One small benefit to this: We no longer hear "It's only variance" 

We had variance during the first 6-8 months of 2015. Since November we've had a sustained, relentless increase in network hash rate that isn't likely to go away soon. If we are really lucky we'll stop the sustained increases and encounter "variance" again. I personally don't think that will happen until June at the earliest.  It will be interesting to see if there is some kind of rush to "sell your mining hardware" before it takes a hit in resale value as a result of the halving.

"May you live in interesting times"

I'll add one item, and then I need to "sign off" from this thread. The old adage:

"Don't invest more into Bitcoin than you are willing to lose" (my emphasis)

It's actually applicable to a whole variety of risky speculative investments, which I consider Bitcoin to be. For me, and this is just me, if Bitcoin were to go to zero, I would be unhappy. It wouldn't change my life or my family situation. My SP20 would join the other E-waste I have produced through various generations of PC hardware and such.  My wife might be a shade happier by having the one unfinished room in our basement get a little more quiet.

You are the only one that can decide your risk tolerance for a $30,000 investment in BTC hardware.

Why couldn't this be deployments of Bitfury based gear, or even 21 Inc stuff? The 21 folks have been very quiet lately.....

I am really not understanding what's going on here. Based on Comment #3 you have plenty of experience with mining gear, and good electricity price, and $30,000 burning a hole in your pocket that you want to spend on more Bitcoin mining gear. You've gotten a lot of thoughts and ideas. It's now time for you to do what you think is best for you. No one else has your circumstances, and can't give you an iron-clad guarantee that investing $30K in more S7 hardware is a great idea. The number you've gotten are some cases current and pretty accurate ones (e.g. current BTC earnings for next day or two). The others about BTC price and what happens in the months surrounding the halving are projections.

This is about all anyone can do for you. The rest is for you to decide.

It kinda depends on what aspect of the "Miner in a Box" you focus on. In my opinion, the whole immersion cooling stuff is squarely aimed at density (i.e. TH per square foot). The rest of the container business has been done by others and was aimed at simplification of installation and setup. Both of those have additional costs over and above the actual mining hardware. We've even seen a "Mining Trailer" that looked like it could easily be move in a day if the connections were right. While interesting, there is precious little value in making a substantial mining "operation" mobile to any significant degree. Yes it make the initial install easier, at a cost, but after that.

I focused on the immersion cooling aspect of this, and it seems fairly costly compared to a more "spread out" facility with lots of air flow. Pumps, radiators, and 3M NOVEC (or Flourinert), aren't cheap at all. They also have a long term run cost compared to fans and a more hospitable natural environment (e.g. a cool/cold climate).

I interpret the phrase "last stable build" to mean "in terms of design and specifications" (my emphasis here).  While I guess it could mean that Batch 9 and 10 will of lesser build quality, I don't think that's the case.

The pricing of the miner is one thing that Bitmain can adjust fairly easily. The engineering, design, and manufacturing are pretty well fixed now. They can, and will, adjust the price to reflect external factors. That includes demand (i.e. nobody will pay 5 BTC anymore, but would last September). If they get serious competition from say Bitfury, they might well adjust it down again. If for some reason bitfury and Avalon went out of business tomorrow, they might well increase the price. Bitmain can also "adjust" the price by deciding if they use a fixed BTC price, or a fixed dollar price. They have done that in the past, and could do so again.

I think the old adage "Don't invest more than you can afford to lose" is as important as ever.

While I don't subscribe to "doom and gloom" scenario for life in general, it's difficult to see how BTC transaction fees can support the current BTC mining infrastructure in 20 years. In electricity costs alone, the current "transaction processing" costs are just way too high.

This will become more evident this summer, and even more so in 4 more years (roughly).

If a transaction fee is say .001 (which I think is high), then you would need 1000 packed into a block to equal 1 BTC right? The costs to do that are pretty staggering right now. While I expect we'll get more efficient equipment over 20 years, I am afraid that difficulty adjustments will negate a good deal of that. I expect that for BTC to survive long term its price will have to increase substantially, AND we'll need a massive shake out in mining infrastructure to allow difficulty to fall. How many TH/s do we need to adequately provide an accurate and complete record of transactions?

What's interesting is that for most other forms of currency, there isn't a strict accounting of what the costs of supporting it are. Bitcoin makes that much more obvious.

It all depends on what you want to happen as a result of purchasing 20-25 S7 miners, associated power supplies, and required infrastructure (i.e. electrical, space, cooling,etc), and associated taxes and shipping.

Are you hoping that 3 months later you'll have $60,000 in BTC? This will not happen. While the electrical price is swell at $.02/HWh, you have to consider all the other costs that have to come out of your $30K. Some folks forget that the additional costs (import taxes for one) can easily add 40% to the cost of the ASIC purchases from Bitmain.

This is all a giant crap-shoot on how profitable this kind of "investment" will be. You won't have this all shipped, installed, and working  in less than 30 days. At that point in time, you'll start earning BTC. If 6 months later the BTC you have earned + the residual miner value is less than $30K, will that be a problem for you? Are you prepared to administer, and fix any broken hardware. Something will go awrywith 20+ S7 miners.

Do you know what "The Halving" refers to?

When you buy mining equipment, you are speculating on at least three things:

1) Future BTC price (assuming yo care about profit)

2) Future difficulty increases, which you already seem aware of, though don't feel you can accurately predict. Nobody on this forum can predict that either. Everybody has a guess

3) The residual value of your hardware when you decide to sell it.

How much experience do you have with ASIC mining equipment. If you have no concept of how hot, loud, and power hungry an S7 is, you probably shouldn't just decide to drop $30K on mining gear.

Just out of curiosity, how did you arrive at the $30,000 number? If that will cause you significant hardship if you lose most of it, you need to rethink and start way smaller.

You might also consider just speculating on the value change of BTC (i.e. buy BTC directly) with some of your money.

Start by contacting Bitfury and asking for the following:

1) Specifications for their chip.

2) What it will cost to purchase chips.

3) When they would be able to deliver those to you.

Don't be surprised if they don't answer you unless you have at least a million USD to interest them. If you can answer the above questions, then please come back and ask more questions. You probably will have to sign a Non Disclosure Agreement (aka NDA) before they provide this information to you.

Best of luck.

No offense intended, but if skuser is correct at 20.9%, then we all lose. Just scrolling back, you have to go back to August of 2014 to see one in excess of 20%. We did have a gut wrenching 18.14% change just this last December.

Since October of last year, my rough eyeball calculation puts the difficulty increase at well north of 80%. This is just brutal compared to a good 6 months of 2015. Welcome to the "ASIC arms race"!!!

 

It's kind of interesting to see what drives this kind of product. Obviously it's all about density in terms of hashrate per square foot (or meter if you prefer). I am wondering though, where is real estate for a mining enterprise expensive, but has low electricity costs? Sure you could decide to put mining farm in downtown Tokyo, but wouldn't the electricity cost also be large?

It seems to me that there has got to be a fairly limited market, and for a truly cost efficient mining enterprise, you need cheap electricity, modest to cheap real estate, and reliable Internet. So far it seems that this will be the mining "holy grail" for the future, and that you could go ahead and optimize one, but completely lose on the others (e.g. cheap real estate and electricity, but poor Internet).

Either way, I think it's unlikely that any of the forum members will be trying to purchase one of the containerized mining farms anytime soon. I would be interested though on what it costs, and the surrounding infrastructure items and costs (e.g. 480VAC? Chilled water? What?).

+14.8 = alh

What an awful prediction though......

While the chart that calls out 110M transactions isn't completely clear, I interpret it to mean that from Feb 2015 until Feb2016, there were about 50M transactions for that year. 110M /day just doesn't make any sense. Unless Kano isn't playing things straight, the "Transaction Fees" in a block are no more than .3 BTC (roughly). Multiply that by say 200 (a really huge day), and you have 60 BTC in fees? Divide that by 110M and the fee essentially vanishes. It can't that small I don't think.

While a coupon is nice, it really isn't all that spectacular considering the two-week delay before anything ships. The next difficulty adjustment will swallow that .05BTC discount for sure, won't it?

I don't think we should expect there to be any significant slowdown soon. The ASIC manufacturers want to exract every possible $$$ (mu fiat of choice), while they can. None of them know what the halving will do to the price of mining gear and their ability to sell it. Right now it's a sellers market, and they will try and feed the appetite, along with transferring any risk, to the willing buyers.

Bitmain lit the fuse back in August, and re-ignited the ASIC arms race. They make their money on the front end, and give up some possible appreciation and earnings, to let the buyer take the risk.

Sell while the selling is good.

I think that this focus on "decentralization" is way over-blown. I think that there is precious little consensus on what it means to be "decentralized". Wouldn't 100 roughly equal sized pools do it? How about a 1000? I don't expect that it will make much sense for the economics of "mining" (aka transaction processing) to be viable for more than a few hundr4ed or a few thousand locales and facilities. Fine I get the fear about the dreaded "51% attack", but mining need not be viable to 90% of the folks on this forum to be safe and "decentralized".

I would then further suggest that Bitcoins success or failure will have almost nothing to with decentralization. As a currency, it needs some semblance of stability. Right now its got all the anonymity of cash, which almost nobody uses for anything but small in person transactions where you take the purchased item with you. Who here gets paid in actual cash? Who would send off cash to an unidentified person and them not having confidence in who you are? As a payment scheme, Bitcoin really come up short, except possibly in some very limited scenarios. Just look at all the various methods folks use to prevent fraud and such. Escrow services? Signed transactions? All of this is made up and seems pretty hokey compared to a credit card, or even PayPal.

Just my $.02 on the topic.

Assuming you have 220V (or at least 208V) available where you want to place the miner. I also hear that the Bitmain PSU is fairly loud, but have no actual experience. Of course the S7 may well drown out the noise of the Bitmain PSU.

I saw a posting in the "Main Antminder S7" thread about a Chinese Spring Festival that starts now, and runs for about two weeks.  Just thought folks here might want to know, and/or to confirm it.

This would also suggest that if your miner didn't ship today, it will be at least 2 weeks until it does? One more difficulty increase for sure it would seem to me. I wonder if this another of those Chinese holidays where a huge portion of the population travels back home from wherever they work.