The Impending Stalemate on Mining Hardware and ROI

[jhansen858]

Bitcoin mining is a waiting game.  Those who can wait the longest will benefit the most. 

If you like waiting I've got a bunch of GPUs that I'll sell cheap

I stopped mining for about 2 years back when the difficulty was at 150k and bitcoins were at 3.00 each.  I thought to my self, ahh this is a waste of time.  I'm over it.  How much I regret that decision of not being patient. 

[notme]

Miners are hurting bad today with BTC value plummeting all over the exchanges. The gold rush is already over, those with the first few Avalons were the only big winners to come out of it.

The rest still hoping to get their hardware soon will be faced with their units having a pretty low ROI unless Bitcoin rallys up hard. There is nothing saying we won't see another Cyprus that will pump Bitcoin and Litecoin back to a good ROI level, and I actually think there will be in time with more of these "bail ins" and people needing a fiat escape pod, but for now the mining scene is pretty grim 

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[byronbb]

some people like to make fresh coins... freshens up their laundring

and miner makers can just keep making them for themselves

there is a lot of whining of people who want the easy button on a money tree to last forever..  where in the world does that ever last?

vultures, etc will always swooop in

This is the key. A good business return is 5% roi, the S&P, ie big business pushes 10. No where in the world outside of the cocaine business do we have returns that are comparable to what the early miners were able to achieve.

[suprabitz]

The key to determining difficulty increase is to look at GPU vs CPU mining. GPU was an exponential increase over CPUs, as Asics are over GPUs.  It increases exponentially at first because they are so much faster, but as more and more come online it becomes more linear. As we saw after everyone switched to GPUs. People added more and more gpus so they were increasing 50%, 100%, 150%... not 500%, 1000%, 2000% as we see from people getting 70gh/s machines. They go from hasing 5-10Gh/s to 70gh/s thats a 7x-14x increase of course diff jumps up. Now when they add the second avalon thats a 70gh/s to 140gh/s increase only a 2x increase. even adding a 3rd avalon to 210gh/s is only a 3x increase. Nowhere near a 7-14x increase of their initial jump from GPU to Asic.

So in the same way we'll see diff flatline but the $64,000 question is WHEN because it makes a HUGE difference.