small home mining, the future?

[ezeminer]

As far as mining now days do ROI and see if buying a machine or hosted miner makes most sense for you.

keeping your bitcoin makes more sense now.

[LiQio]

You can profit short and long term if you operate your mining operation correctly.  Granted you need things such as low priced electricity.

I really don't see how to operate on profit long term even with low priced electricity and stable or slightly increasing bitcoin prices.
But you use the word "correctly" on purpose - would you mind elaborating? Thanks.

[Amph]

The network needs grease to work.  Okay.  Nobody with sense will mine at a loss.  But explain how the network won't work with only a few large mega farms and a few ASIC manufacturers.  I don't quite see how it can't.

right now there is too much centralization on mining, when bitcoin is supposed to be decentralized, not looking good indeed

small miners need their spots, for this to happenen, the price should increase fast(faster than the diff), this should make mining profitable again even for casual miners

I think there will always be a spot for small miners. Right now with it being between generations on chips, it's a interesting time. The longer we remain waiting on next gen the better of small miners do.

it's better for them to sell their equipment, and buy bitcoin instead of wasting money on HW mining, there is no revenue right now for little miners

[Mikestang]

try to imagine yourself in November of 2011 and apply the same logic, considering that price was low, halving was coming, miners were unprofitable, bitcoin was in the downtrend. How did that situation predicted the next 24 mo with bitcoin going from $2 to $1160? It didn't. I am not saying that we will have the same spurt, just that it is not really predictable.

Mining technology was growing at an exponential rate at the end of 2011 and that had a huge factor on btc value and network difficulty.  We do not have that same exponential technology growth this time around.  I think the halving is going to see a lot of large farms shut down.  Eventually, after another couple halvings, farm mining will be cost ineffective and home mining will hopefully be the top dog.  I think, in the long run, home mining dominating the network is "more healthy" for bitcoin than all these large multi-petahash farms.

[ezeminer]

try to imagine yourself in November of 2011 and apply the same logic, considering that price was low, halving was coming, miners were unprofitable, bitcoin was in the downtrend. How did that situation predicted the next 24 mo with bitcoin going from $2 to $1160? It didn't. I am not saying that we will have the same spurt, just that it is not really predictable.

Mining technology was growing at an exponential rate at the end of 2011 and that had a huge factor on btc value and network difficulty.  We do not have that same exponential technology growth this time around.  I think the halving is going to see a lot of large farms shut down.  Eventually, after another couple halvings, farm mining will be cost ineffective and home mining will hopefully be the top dog.  I think, in the long run, home mining dominating the network is "more healthy" for bitcoin than all these large multi-petahash farms.

We could also look at the mt gox "bot trading". That might have manipulated the bitcoin price..

[alani123]

I know people that keep mining home at loss, just because they want to also gain their bits through mining.

If the mining game turns into a bigger arms race, I'm assuming that home miners will become something like full nodes. Not convenient to maintain one home but it helps to keep the network healthy and decentralised. With that said, there's also many people that mine as a hobby with minimal profit and others hoping that the price might go up again so they can break even.