We tend to call it BTC.
current hashrates, huh? what is your estimate of future hashrates and difficulty rises?
it is unlikely that you can break even by buying any miners currently available, even with free electricity.
show us your maths...
on resilience and non-24 hour mining, this just makes things worse.
The maths is based on percent of hashrate owned.
When I looked today the BTC hashrate was 291,368,921Ghs. Lets just call that 300,000,000Ghs (funny how it almost matches the speed of light).
So say 4 S3's contributes a droplet of close to 2,000Ghs or 0.0006% of total hashrate.
This means that the pooled rigs should also return an average 0.0006% of mined coins.
3,700 bitcoins a mined each day at the current reward of 25BTC/Block
4 S3 rigs should average 0.0222BTC/day which at current exchange rate of $360 is about $8/day or $240/month.
Depreciate the $1000 purchase cost over 6 months leaves about $440 take home.
At 16 hours a day, 2Th breaks even here, anything more adds profit.
The diminishing effect of future hashrate has certainly not been lost on me and I need to figure a hashrate depreciation estimate for the rigs. But I'm fairly confident that starting with anything from 10 to 24 rigs will still leave me turning a profit by the end of 6 months, with good gains early on. But here's my speculations...
From my observation of the hashrate chart, we can see rate growth starting to go linear from recent exponential growth. This is a good thing for miners because it means that mining rigs won't become obsolete as quickly as they have been. The technology and hashrate growth itself becomes stable and additional hash comes from linear volumes of rigs and not so much from exponential increases of hash efficiency.
So from that, I don't see that the exponential increase in the numbers of rigs will continue much longer. At a guess, I imagine ASICs will stabilise at the 20 to 14nm node if they're lucky. The instabiliy of physics itself at that scale is too much to contend due to quantum tunneling leakage.
I imagine all the commercial hydro capacity will be consumed by industrial miners within the next year (wild speculation as I have no idea how much capacity is there).
So as I read it, hashrate will flatten out over the next year. We'll no doubt see significant stepups when those lower node ASICs are pushed into production but it will still be a largely a linear curve.
I think by the end of 2015, the hash efficiency plateaus and the rig numbers stabilise. The big guys will have all the big hydro. The little guys should also be looking for private hydro now.
On top of that, esspecially in 2016 when block reward drops to 12.5BTC, returns will be halved and cull most of the network. Mature hydro installations will be all that remains and will stay in the play only because of the drop in difficuly to possibly a 1/4 of what it was or less.
Site expenses will force them to downsize and retire or sell perfectly good rigs en mass. Many of the rigs that remain will be power cycled only when the exchange rate is worth it. A smart farm owners income would probably come more from long term contracts than by mining returnes directly.
The level of difficulty will then become governed more by the exchange rate than by the maximum amount of hash power available on the network.
So that brings us to the exchange rate itself. As I can see, it can only go up and right now is the best time to be accumulating BTC. The extreme bubble at the start of the year was just the bang that announced BTC to the mainstream. It shook out a whole lot of behaviour that really needed to go and has forced governements to take BTC seriously with regard to regulation and legalities. Much of the prior volitiliy has gone already and regulation will be a stabilising force globally. Adding to this, the matuation of the BTC services sector such as exchanges, ATMs, POS and big retail is growing rapidly and pushing the BTC brand into mainstream acceptance and use. This mainsteam acceptance will also follow spectecular exponential growth forcing exponential growth in the exchange rate as a fundamental to the market and not as the speculation that blew-out at the start of the year.
BTC is now at the end of the period of scepticism caused by that bubble and is about to ramp up again with far greater security until it matches the liquidity of major currencies or is fundamentally limited by the maximum acceptable exchange rate of 1 satoshi, IOW transaction fees exceed that of fiat currency exchange. Imagine BTC at rates where your coffee cost 1 satoshi but so does the transaction fee, your going to pay in fiat.
Until then. Looks good to jump onboard now....
ragman
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