Difficulty jump! Barrier of entry for mining

[mwizard]

It's probably a poor choice to call it mining, rather than minting. It's supposed to be a currency after all, and not extraction of money from somewhere. No other kind of modern currency has private individuals producing they own coins (or paper).

I agree calling it mining is not accurate. For example if the bitcoin price rises the amount of bitcoin mined worldwide does not rise.

I prefer to think of it as a lottery for 144 daily prizes.  Each time you calculate a hash you buy a ticket in the lottery.

So perhaps a better description than mining is that every day 144 blocks of 25 bitcoin are minted, and then distributed by lottery.

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[mwizard]

it's getting harder and harder to mine and its only going to get harder. i actually think it's amazing that the creator of bitcoin set it up like this,  reward those who got in early and helped btc grow and make it harder as time goes on to mine coins when btc has gotten more popular

Agree. It was always expected by Satoshi that this would occur.

From Satoshi on Development & Technical Discussion > Post reply ( Re: Scalability and transaction rate )
Quote from: satoshi on July 29, 2010, 02:00:38 AM

"The current system where every user is a network node is not the intended configuration for large scale.  That would be like every Usenet user runs their own NNTP server.  The design supports letting users just be users.  The more burden it is to run a node, the fewer nodes there will be.  Those few nodes will be big server farms.  The rest will be client nodes that only do transactions and don't generate."

[mwizard]

Difficulty has just jumped 5%, some 14/16nm chips are being turned on?

Don't underestimate the size of the daily or weekly variation in hash rate due to statistical noise.  The hash rate regularly varies by 10% to 20% from day to day solely due to statistical variance.  It is only over a week or longer that actual changes in the hash rate become clear.

You can expect the hash rate difficulty changes every two weeks to fluctuate within a range of about plus and minus 2-4% solely due to statistical noise even if there is no change to the total actual network hash rate.  

It is only over months that long term trends are clearer.

The mathematical details.

There is a 10 minute block average solve time with a 10 minute variance (poisson distribution).  So the standard deviation percentage error in solve time is 100 / sqrt(number blocks). Most of the time the difficulty change will be within 2 standard deviations.  

There are 2016 blocks found on average between each difficulty change so for each change the standard deviation is 100 / sqrt(2016) or about 2%.  Two deviations are 4%.  So hash difficulty changes may be frequently in error by 2% and possibly as high as 5%.  So don't be surprised by a 5% change.  It may simple be due to the previous fortnight being 2% or so under and the next 2% over.

[ivanst776]

Majority will agree, mining btc directly is not worth it unless you have some serious hardware money.

[afriezalie]

Majority will agree, mining btc directly is not worth it unless you have some serious hardware money.

Mining was the past. Right now anything about mining i think isn't profitable. Cloud mining full of ponzi, individual mining can't get ROI, pool mining full of scam. So now, mining isn't a trend.

[Amph]

Majority will agree, mining btc directly is not worth it unless you have some serious hardware money.

Mining was the past. Right now anything about mining i think isn't profitable. Cloud mining full of ponzi, individual mining can't get ROI, pool mining full of scam. So now, mining isn't a trend.

the whole mining, is dead, at least for casual miners, and with bitcoin(unless you have plenty of money to invest in some serious farm, but even then it will be probably, not worth it, a bit risky if you ask me), if you still want to mine something there is only the altcoin section

[afriezalie]

Majority will agree, mining btc directly is not worth it unless you have some serious hardware money.

Mining was the past. Right now anything about mining i think isn't profitable. Cloud mining full of ponzi, individual mining can't get ROI, pool mining full of scam. So now, mining isn't a trend.

the whole mining, is dead, at least for casual miners, and with bitcoin(unless you have plenty of money to invest in some serious farm, but even then it will be probably, not worth it, a bit risky if you ask me), if you still want to mine something there is only the altcoin section

I think altcoin price is unstale right now. Also there are many pre-mined coins and scam coins. This mean altcoin mining is risky too. Mining is too hard right now.