When and if the Winklevoss ETF is approved.

Transaction fees will not increase that much in the next 3 years when the next halving takes place.

Currently, transaction fees are 0.59% (for today) of the block reward or about 0.1475 BTC. For there to be enough transactions to make up for the 12.5 BTC we will lose with the next halving, we would have to have roughly 85 number the transactions we have today!

I don't doubt that will happen someday if Bitcoin really succeeds. But it isn't going to happen in the next three years.

Here is the bad part though: Let's say we actually had 85 the number of transactions. The easiest way for that to happen is if 85 times as many people started using bitcoin. Well, then bitcoin would be essentially 85 times as popular and there would be a HUGE surge in its price. At that point 1 BTC would easily be worth a couple of thousands of dollars. So what would happen to the transaction fees? If they stayed at 0.0005 what was once a $0.05 fee now is 50 cents or a dollar or more! The transaction fee would be dropped to compensate, probably to 0.0001 or even 0.00005. This would have the effect of the block reward transaction portion to drop by 5 or 10 or so. So that 12.5 BTC transaction reward is now only 2.5 BTC or 1.25 BTC.

There is no way transactions can ever make up for the block reward halving, at least not in the next couple of decades.

There is a private mining pool that added 100 TH/s in the past week or so. People are speculating it's Bitfury chips.

Cointerra claims they will add 2 PH/s in December.

Bitfury is already out there and the others are coming soon.  There is no question that the difficulty is still increasing exponentially and it looks like it will continue, at least for the next 6 months.

ASICMiner will have a very hard time keeping up, especially with their old technology.

The answer is simple:

Rising difficulty from increased competition.


It should have been obvious to any early ASICMiner investor that there was no way their dividends could last forever.

The only reason why ASICMiner was so successful was because both BFL and Avalon had serious delays in shipping so ASICMiner pretty much dominated mining.

And since people were desperate to get their hands on any miner and ASICMiner hardware was the only hardware available they did very well with hardware sales.

But now we have KNCMiner, Bitfury, and HashFast at least beginning to ship (bitfury already is), BFL is shipping, and Avalon is shipping their discrete chips and difficulty is soaring. All the new companies have better technology that is faster and consumes less power.

ASICMiner doesn't have a large piece of the pie anymore. And it obvious that it is only going to shrink further. And the smart investor sells BEFORE their piece shrinks in order to get out before everyone else. Ideally you sell at the peak, when things seem to be going well. I wanted to sell at 5.00 but it never really got there. I ended up selling my 100 shares at an average of 4.10 or so, which still isn't bad but I was a little late.

For those of you still sitting on your shares hoping for a huge profit, it's not going happen. The time a mining company will be profitable is always limited. At the best, a mining companies profits will always be cut in half every 4 years due to the block halving. Timing is everything. No mining company has a business model that is viable for consistent long term profits. It's all about making a quick buck and getting out.

Where is the option for correctly valued?

I guess you haven't head of DicCoin then. It's like NameCoin. Decentralized international dictionary.

Good job, guys. I just joined the Bitcoin Foundation.

What exchange rate did you get charged?

I noticed the exchange rate on my purchase wasn't very good.

I ordered the first date and paid $94.5/btc.

Same as what others said. You can't ROI right now.

Best thing to do is to read this forum everyday. Wait till a new company announces a new pre-order miner and be the first in line to take a big risk and pre-order. Then pray it wasn't a scam and that they actually deliver on time. That is what everyone who made money since ASICs took over has done. You might get lucky and make some money.

The mug with my jalapeño came broken

:-(

If you ordered a single, unless you ordered in July or August or maybe September of last year I would request a refund ASAP before BFL is flooded with so many refunds that they go out of business.

Even if BFL starts shipping quickly then difficulty would rise even faster. You have no chance of making your investment back.

Thanks for responding Graet. In your opinion, does it seem like the pool has been having a lot of bad luck the past few weeks or so? It would be nice if there was a stat like Eligius's "luck" that told you how the pool was doing that day or round relative to the estimated rate it would be expected to find blocks. That way I could tell whether it was just bad luck or if my miners were underperforming.

I'm going to give it another few months, I suppose. Rising difficulty means that I will never overcome past bad luck though, and I expect I will always be below "average" from now on.


The hashrate I expect and the hashrate ozcoin reports to me does indeed match up, which is good.


I think DGM is probably fine. I'm guessing it seems to underpay mostly because I suppose Ozcoin has been unlucky the past couple of months and hasn't found the expected number of blocks.
And when there is an "average" day and it finds the number of blocks expected, payouts are lower to make up for large payouts from previous long rounds. I suppose that is what I am seeing.


The problem here is I don't really understand how pools work. So if someone could explain it to me or point me to some web page that explains it, that would be great. I understand that a miner has a block and choses nonces until they double sha256 hash is under a given a threshold. That much for solo mining makes sense for me. But I guess I really don't know what a "share" is. Is it a set or range of nonces the miner hashes? And how can the pool operator verify a share faster than a miner can computer them? If someone would explain the math behind it to me that would be great. I naively assumed that pools would assign miners ranges of nonces to try and miners would return the hashed "solutions" and the pool would just accept their word for it. I'm guessing the reality is more complicated than that. 



The thing is when ozcoin has gone down, it still has accepted shares which has meant my miners have never failed over. So even though the pool looks like it is done (from looking at the webstats), maybe it actually wasn't. But it is unclear whether it was working properly at that time. For example, there were times when the webstats would show everyones hash rate at half of what was expected. Was this due to a network problem that caused everyone to only be able to submit half the number of shares and thus the pool was running at half its expected rate. Or was everything working correctly and just the hashrate being calculated incorrectly. It's hard, if not impossible to tell.


I agree. As long as I can get withing a few percent of what I expect in the long run, I'm going to chose the pool that I like the best over one the one that might pay slightly more. But 15% is too much to ignore if it continues. It's meant 9 btc over the past 45 days which is not insignificant.

ok, I'll let it go for longer and see what happens. Unfortunately, rising difficulty means it is very unlikely that I will be able to overcome the variance I've seen already in the past.


I understand this. But when the rounds are found at their expected rate, shouldn't the payouts be what is expected.

In other words, if the pools hashrate means that you would expect to find a block every 6 hours, and you do find 4 blocks in a day roughly every 6 hours, wouldn't you expect the payouts to match? In other words, wouldn't you expect that each round would payout 1/4 of your expected rate. The amount always seems to be less than that.


I'm not sure what you mean there at the end.

I've only been mining for about a month and a half now (45 days). I have an Avalon, two BFL Jalapenos and a BFL FPGA which total about 100 GHash/sec if everything is working correctly.

I've been mining mostly on Ozcoin and I keep very detailed statistics including the daily hashrate for my miners and the payout for every block found for the pool.

Ozcoin charges a 1% fee and uses DGM payout method (there is also POT but I always use DGM). DGM is similar to PPLNS. Well kind of.

I also keep track of the current difficulty and what my expected earnings for each day should be (minus the 1% fees).

I use that to calculate a "luck percentage" where 100% is when I hit my expected earnings target.

What I've noticed is that of the past 45 days only 9 of the days did I ever reach 100% or above. The other 36 days I was below 100%. There are several days where I was 50% or less and only about 2 or 3 days where I was significantly above 100%. Overall, my payout is just 85.59% of what was expected.

Now, I realize there is a huge amount of variance because this pool pays based on blocks found and every pool has unlucky days when there are fewer blocks found than expected.

What I'm trying to figure out is if it is just the case that Ozcoin has been very unlucky the past 6 weeks or if I am calculating something incorrectly. FYI, I am using the hashrate reported to me by Ozcoin to calculate what my expected earnings should be. 85.59% seems particularly bad. I don't see why I would stick with Ozcoin (as much as I do love it) and not switch to a pool like 50BTC where I would be guarenteed to make 97% of my expected earnings. It seems that extra 2% isn't really worth it when the variance can really hurt you.

As far as I can tell, the reasons for the much lower than expected earnings are one of the following:

1) Variance in the pool. Basically, just bad luck. I would have expected this to have averaged out over 45 days but it seems to me to consistently be underperforming. Maybe I haven't waiting long enough. I dunno.

2) The hashrate Ozcoin is reporting for my miners isn't the exact hashrate that I am getting when it comes to the number of valid shares I'm submitting. I'm not sure why this would be the case. My "efficiency" is always about 99.5% across all my miners when it comes to valid shares. Maybe everything is actually correct but I'm not actually doing the 100 GH/s worth of work Ozcoin is telling me.

3) DGM is underpaying because that of the nature of the algorithm (which is more complicated than most). It seems to underpay even when the pools finds the expected number of blocks each day. I'm not sure why.

4) People are cheating the pool. I always wondered how a pool prevented miners from lying and submitting invalid shares. Obviously the pool can't check every single one, right? They would require to have a hashrate as high as all the miners participating in order to do that, correct? The pools seems to have many more days where it doesn't find the expected number of blocks given the pools reported hashrate. What if people are submitting fake shares making the pool like it has more hashrate that it really does and taking a bigger share of the Ozcoin pie.

5) There are other hidden fees I don't know about. Or perhaps I am calculating my expecting earnings incorrectly. My calculations do seem to match up with what ozcoins own utility bots (in its IRC channel) seem to tell me.

6) Ozcoin itself has some problems. The pool has gone down on occasion and has had problems where the statistics were unavailable for a time (though the owners claimed it was still processing shares correctly). There could be some bugs in its software.

Which of these seem most likely? I'm probably going to give another pool a shot for a while and see if it is any better. I do really like Ozcoin though and I want to continue mining there.

What is the experience that other people have when it comes to expected earnings vs actual earnings?

That pre-order is no longer worth what you paid for it.

You would do better simply getting a refund from BFL.

I meant 2012. If you had actually bothered to read the rest of my post you would have realized that was a typo.

The mentality of the BFL apologists here reminds of the battered women who stick with their husbands.

"Oh no, I can't file for divorce because he would get angry and beat me even more! Best to stay with my man and pray the abuse stops."

They are shipping singles from JULY 4, 2013 right now. That's only about 2 WEEKS into their backlog. How is that not "terribly far behind".

2 weeks out of roughly 60 weeks of pre-orders seems terribly far behind to me.

They seem to be shipping a days worth of singles every two days. That means they will be shipping a single ordered today in a little over 2 years from now at the rate they are currently going. And this is their new, improved, faster rate.

Unless you ordered last July, it makes sense to get a refund NOW, before they run out of money and can no longer process refunds.

FTC is one way to go, but I think a better solution is to contact a lawyer located near them and organize a class action lawsuit. Post the details of the lawsuit here and let people join in.
No, we won't all get refunds back that way, but will should all get at least something. And since there are potentially criminal charges in addition to civil ones we would be able to go after the assets of not just BFL itself but also their employees who have defrauded us.