Investment hedging

[btcnut]

Hi all,

New to the forum, despite having spent a massive amount of time readin up and lurking.

I am defining a strategy to enter the BTC mining game a bit late. I originally read about BTC back early last year but dismissed it because there was no real market (to exchange goods and services). It seems like things are getting a bit more interesting now so I feel like having a dabble.

I am looking to hedge my investment based on
- uncertainty around asics availability
- certainty around GPU/FPGA
- need to get ROI as fast as possible to avoid being hit hard by the change in block reward rate.

Does anyone know what the current ETA is for the reward rate to drop to 25BTC/block? This will probably affect my investment strategy a bit.

Current plan is to setup a cluster of 7970s (12-16) on junk motherboards to mine as quick as possible (while its still winter here) and then ditch these once breaking even (collecting sale of cards) to then reinvest in ASIC's or FPGA.

Thoughts?

[payb.tc]

Does anyone know what the current ETA is for the reward rate to drop to 25BTC/block?

i have one going on http://bitcoinclock.com

right now it says Reward-Drop ETA: 2012-12-04 09:47:39

[btcnut]

Thanks for that

What drives the drop date? Is it the global hash rate (i.e. number of blocks processed)? i.e. if the ASIC compute comes online in october, would the date move forward dramatically?

[DeathAndTaxes]

The reward is halved (technically right shifted) every 210,000 blocks. The date is based on an estimate of when we hit 210,000 blocks.  A large increase in hash power will temporarily increase the rate of block generation so that it is faster than one block per ten minutes and any period where block generation rate is faster than one per ten minutes will move the date forward.  However the network adjusts difficulty every 2016 blocks so even increasing the global hashrate by a factor of 3x would only cause a small change in the date.  A couple hundred blocks would be hashed much faster and then the network difficulty would adjust and despite having 4x the hashing power block generation would be back to roughly one per ten minutes.  The closer we get to the date the less any potential hashrate increase (or decrease) will affect the date.  

At this point you could say Dec 4 +/- 1 week with a high level of confidence.