Difficulty drop

[tbcoin]

Will there be such a thing as new ASIC miners?  Will people who have never mined before want to invest money in ASIC?  When GPU mining was profitable, anyone could do it, people got interested and upgraded.  I think the advent of ASIC makes it a niche sport now.

Why??

Its gonne be even easier dude!!!!!!!!!!!!! No high end PC or vid cards to buy & maintain.No issues with vid drivers,OC'in,drawing too much current from your PSU OR your outlet.

ANYONE can buy one & hook up a USB cable,DL the miner software,join a pool & boom your mining on an old P.O.S. PC..............

Hell,my mom is 72 years old & she could do it 

Also keep in mind that it is relatively easy to get a graphics card in much of the world, but acquire a system ASIC is very different, especially if you do not live in USA.

You are forced to buy from abroad, adding paperwork, waiting times and tariffs (very big in some cases).

In addition, BFL, BTCFPGA and Avalon (I think also is based in USA but produced in China) were U.S. companies and these devices are classified under the "U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security export control", so they can simply refuse sale by your country of origin.

Although jalapenos and single SC look cheap, with the rise of difficulty, maybe not be more efficient than the same investment in GPU today.

Edit:
13 years old gamers can't mining any more.

[Bogart]

In addition, BFL, BTCFPGA and Avalon (I think also is based in USA but produced in China) were U.S. companies and these devices are classified under the "U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security export control", so they can simply refuse sale by your country of origin.

Q: Will the finished products ship from China?

yes

[tbcoin]

In addition, BFL, BTCFPGA and Avalon (I think also is based in USA but produced in China) were U.S. companies and these devices are classified under the "U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security export control", so they can simply refuse sale by your country of origin.

Q: Will the finished products ship from China?

yes

China also has this type of control, although it may ASIC not be listed.

http://www.kslaw.com/Library/publication/China's%20Export%20Controls%20and%20Encryption%20Regulations.pdf

[Unacceptable]

Will there be such a thing as new ASIC miners?  Will people who have never mined before want to invest money in ASIC?  When GPU mining was profitable, anyone could do it, people got interested and upgraded.  I think the advent of ASIC makes it a niche sport now.

Why??

Its gonne be even easier dude!!!!!!!!!!!!! No high end PC or vid cards to buy & maintain.No issues with vid drivers,OC'in,drawing too much current from your PSU OR your outlet.

ANYONE can buy one & hook up a USB cable,DL the miner software,join a pool & boom your mining on an old P.O.S. PC..............

Hell,my mom is 72 years old & she could do it 

This is true, however, I anticipate that after ASIC's are about and hashing publicly, the difficulty will rise so high that owning a Jalepeno will be like using a X750 or X770 ATi card.

I agree 

But,like with GPU's now,you still need a specific amount of hashing power to make anything (around 3gh/s seems to be ok for me now).

So,maybe 30-90 gh/s in the future to make what I'm making now.We won't know until feb-march when the ASIC's saturate the mining market.

+ the price of BTC should go up a bit after the halving.How much?? Only time will tell............gonna be interesting to watch at any rate 

[Unacceptable]

Will there be such a thing as new ASIC miners?  Will people who have never mined before want to invest money in ASIC?  When GPU mining was profitable, anyone could do it, people got interested and upgraded.  I think the advent of ASIC makes it a niche sport now.

Why??

Its gonne be even easier dude!!!!!!!!!!!!! No high end PC or vid cards to buy & maintain.No issues with vid drivers,OC'in,drawing too much current from your PSU OR your outlet.

ANYONE can buy one & hook up a USB cable,DL the miner software,join a pool & boom your mining on an old P.O.S. PC..............

Hell,my mom is 72 years old & she could do it 

Also keep in mind that it is relatively easy to get a graphics card in much of the world, but acquire a system ASIC is very different, especially if you do not live in USA.

You are forced to buy from abroad, adding paperwork, waiting times and tariffs (very big in some cases).

In addition, BFL, BTCFPGA and Avalon (I think also is based in USA but produced in China) were U.S. companies and these devices are classified under the "U.S. Bureau of Industry and Security export control", so they can simply refuse sale by your country of origin.

Although jalapenos and single SC look cheap, with the rise of difficulty, maybe not be more efficient than the same investment in GPU today.

Edit:
13 years old gamers can't mining any more.

Ahh,didn't see that point of view........I'm an American & I only see things from my side the world 

[kano]

Will there be such a thing as new ASIC miners?  Will people who have never mined before want to invest money in ASIC?  When GPU mining was profitable, anyone could do it, people got interested and upgraded.  I think the advent of ASIC makes it a niche sport now.

Why??

Its gonne be even easier dude!!!!!!!!!!!!! No high end PC or vid cards to buy & maintain.No issues with vid drivers,OC'in,drawing too much current from your PSU OR your outlet.

ANYONE can buy one & hook up a USB cable,DL the miner software,join a pool & boom your mining on an old P.O.S. PC..............

Hell,my mom is 72 years old & she could do it  

This is true, however, I anticipate that after ASIC's are about and hashing publicly, the difficulty will rise so high that owning a Jalepeno will be like using a X750 or X770 ATi card.

Dare I state the obvious ....

Is this in any way unexpected?

The price performance of the devices is of course relative - but the price point certainly suggests buying a Jalepeno and mining with it in the near future will be no better than buying a cheap GFX card now and mining with it.

The $1k ASIC devices may even (in the not too distant future) be no better than mining with a high end (but certainly cheaper) GFX card is now.

Difficulty will adjust and we'll all be back where we started ... except our pockets will have emptied themselves into the ASIC manufacturer's pockets. Certainly not a criticism of the manufacturers - just a simple fact that's how it works.

[Bogart]

Difficulty will adjust and we'll all be back where we started ... except our pockets will have emptied themselves into the ASIC manufacturer's pockets. Certainly not a criticism of the manufacturers - just a simple fact that's how it works.

Shovel-making sure is a sweet business to be in during a gold rush.

[dirtycat]

Will there be such a thing as new ASIC miners?  Will people who have never mined before want to invest money in ASIC?  When GPU mining was profitable, anyone could do it, people got interested and upgraded.  I think the advent of ASIC makes it a niche sport now.

Why??

Its gonne be even easier dude!!!!!!!!!!!!! No high end PC or vid cards to buy & maintain.No issues with vid drivers,OC'in,drawing too much current from your PSU OR your outlet.

ANYONE can buy one & hook up a USB cable,DL the miner software,join a pool & boom your mining on an old P.O.S. PC..............

Hell,my mom is 72 years old & she could do it  

This is true, however, I anticipate that after ASIC's are about and hashing publicly, the difficulty will rise so high that owning a Jalepeno will be like using a X750 or X770 ATi card.

Agreed.  Its interesting to see the people who are buying 2 or 3 of these devices think they are gonna make millions.. they aren't thinking about the difficulty increase

[DobZombie]

Ahh,didn't see that point of view........I'm an American & I only see things from my side the world 

Most americans do

[firefop]

This is true, however, I anticipate that after ASIC's are about and hashing publicly, the difficulty will rise so high that owning a Jalepeno will be like using a X750 or X770 ATi card.

Agreed.  Its interesting to see the people who are buying 2 or 3 of these devices think they are gonna make millions.. they aren't thinking about the difficulty increase

On a long enough timeline you're correct (of course) - I believe they'll be slightly better return than the same money spent on a video card initially. I project the difficulty will stabalize at a point where an SC single makes between 3 and 4 times what an fpga single makes right now.

Something to recall is the ASICs will have a much lower power consumption and that (at least in the USA) should drop operating costs for most miners. I don't know about everywhere else, but here we have a percentage based rate... in my area it's 11 cent up to 625kwh then 13 cent @ 110% and 15 cent @ 120% then jumps to 35 cent over 130%. Which frankly is a moot point for me since I've offset most of my electric with solar panels. But that will affect some folks at least.

Of course in another year, instead of 5x or 10x difficulty we'll see 20x or 30x and then it's a race 40x as peoples initial re-investments get paid off and everyone starts scaling up.

At 40x difficulty - an FPGA single would take a loss for mining if paying 13 cent per kwh. And SC singles will still be hitting ROI in under a year.

[toonevdb]

Will there be such a thing as new ASIC miners?  Will people who have never mined before want to invest money in ASIC?  When GPU mining was profitable, anyone could do it, people got interested and upgraded.  I think the advent of ASIC makes it a niche sport now.

Why??

Its gonne be even easier dude!!!!!!!!!!!!! No high end PC or vid cards to buy & maintain.No issues with vid drivers,OC'in,drawing too much current from your PSU OR your outlet.

ANYONE can buy one & hook up a USB cable,DL the miner software,join a pool & boom your mining on an old P.O.S. PC..............

Hell,my mom is 72 years old & she could do it 

Well, being late to the scene, I'm considering buying a little sc unit from butterfly labs but I have my concerns about profitability (in part because no deliveries have been made yet and no effect can be seen yet).
However if it is still profiltable after a few months I would buy an asic unit and start mining as a first time miner.

(I have a laptop with internal video card for the moment, i even tried cpu mining a few months ago hehe..)

[Meatball]

Think on this a bit...BFL has already said that they have enough orders to bring the network up about 10x from it's current 20 TH to about 200 TH, which will cut your profitability to 1/10th of where it is today.  Then you factor in the drop in the reward from 50 to 25 BTC in the near future, and that halves your profitability even further.  So, that's a cut of about 1/20th of what you are making today.

Of course this assumes the $/BTC price stays steady, and that 200 TH numbers is really where things end up.  If that is the case, if you are mining with the 4.5 GH that a Jalepeno is supposed to do, you'd make just under 1.5 BTC/day.  After the increase in network size and halving of reward, that 4.5 GH is going to produce about .075 BTC/day, or about 90 cents in USD at today's rate of $12/BTC.

Granted, it's probably still profitable using only about .1 kilowatts/day (or 3/month), but you really going to need to go big or go home when things really ramp up.  We're not even considering orders from other ASIC vendors getting into the hashing pool.  Even if every piece of equipment that's mining today stops and only the new BFL orders are mining, that's about 180 TH which knocks your profitability down from today's rates to about 1/18th...

[crazyates]

Think on this a bit...BFL has already said that they have enough orders to bring the network up about 10x from it's current 20 TH to about 200 TH, which will cut your profitability to 1/10th of where it is today.  Then you factor in the drop in the reward from 50 to 25 BTC in the near future, and that halves your profitability even further.  So, that's about cut of about 1/20th of what you are making today.

So I'll be making 1/20th of what I would be making today, on a per GH/s basis. But I've increased my GH/s 60x, so I'm still coming out 3x ahead. 

[Meatball]

Think on this a bit...BFL has already said that they have enough orders to bring the network up about 10x from it's current 20 TH to about 200 TH, which will cut your profitability to 1/10th of where it is today.  Then you factor in the drop in the reward from 50 to 25 BTC in the near future, and that halves your profitability even further.  So, that's about cut of about 1/20th of what you are making today.

So I'll be making 1/20th of what I would be making today, on a per GH/s basis. But I've increased my GH/s 60x, so I'm still coming out 3x ahead.  

Absolutely...my point was that anyone thinking they'll be able to just continue on with what they're doing now is going to be sorely mistaken.  While there might be a few months of flux in the difficulty rate and hashing numbers that might still allow someone to survive, you're going to need to jump on the ASIC bandwagon.  Figure you're going to need 20x the hashing power of what you're doing now to match what you're making now.  That's likely easy to do if you go ASIC, but someone mining a couple of GH now isn't going to be able just swap in a Jalepeno or two thinking they tripled their hash rate and they'll be alright.  If you got 2 GH now, you'll need at least 40 GH to match your current profits.

[Unacceptable]

Will there be such a thing as new ASIC miners?  Will people who have never mined before want to invest money in ASIC?  When GPU mining was profitable, anyone could do it, people got interested and upgraded.  I think the advent of ASIC makes it a niche sport now.

Why??

Its gonne be even easier dude!!!!!!!!!!!!! No high end PC or vid cards to buy & maintain.No issues with vid drivers,OC'in,drawing too much current from your PSU OR your outlet.

ANYONE can buy one & hook up a USB cable,DL the miner software,join a pool & boom your mining on an old P.O.S. PC..............

Hell,my mom is 72 years old & she could do it  

Well, being late to the scene, I'm considering buying a little sc unit from butterfly labs but I have my concerns about profitability (in part because no deliveries have been made yet and no effect can be seen yet).
However if it is still profiltable after a few months I would buy an asic unit and start mining as a first time miner.

(I have a laptop with internal video card for the moment, i even tried cpu mining a few months ago hehe..)

Never too late to start mining.Just get what you can afford & reinvest the mined BTC in another device & so on.Eventually you will get to a more profitable point.

Thats my thinking for my situation,but,don't put in what you can't afford to tie up for at least 6 months to a year.

I like your thinking Meatball,thanks for sharing 

[firefop]

Well, being late to the scene, I'm considering buying a little sc unit from butterfly labs but I have my concerns about profitability (in part because no deliveries have been made yet and no effect can be seen yet).
However if it is still profiltable after a few months I would buy an asic unit and start mining as a first time miner.

(I have a laptop with internal video card for the moment, i even tried cpu mining a few months ago hehe..)

Never too late to start mining.Just get what you can afford & reinvest the mined BTC in another device & so on.Eventually you will get to a more profitable point.

Thats my thinking for my situation,but,don't put in what you can't afford to tie up for at least 6 months to a year.

I like your thinking Meatball,thanks for sharing 
[/quote]

Exactly personally I re-invest about 20% of what I mine into new hardware. . . seems to keep my income increasing so far.

[Jack1Rip1BurnIt]

Definitely agree with most of you. Have to reinvest a significant amount to keep reaping benefits. I have to do it piece by piece, but I continue to add until I notice I have surpassed my goals. What I like about the reward halving is the fact that I know I have 4 years till I have to worry about it again. Therefore I will probably try and accumulate as much hardware as I can over the next 12 to 18 months(depending upon the performance increase on next generation products). After that I hope I can slow down on purchasing and use what I've accumulated for the remainder of the reward period(pretty much between 2.5 and 3 years).

[Meatball]

Did a quick off the cuff calculation.  We're currently on block # 202,616 (and likely beyond that by the time you read this) and we move to the 25 BTC Reward at block # 210,000 which is a mere 7,384 blocks from now.  Bitcoin charts currently shows we're doing about 7 blocks/hour.  So, at that rate we're just a smidge under 44 days till the switch to 25 BTC.  ASICs are supposed to start shipping in 20-30 days, so at most, the first ASIC's hashing are going to see the 50 BTC reward for maybe 2-3 weeks, and considering that once they start cranking the blocks are going to come fast and furious for a round or two while the difficulty ramps up, so my guess is those 2-3 weeks get compressed to under a week.

So, just for grins, I'm throwing a guesstimate out there that we'll see the switch to 25 BTC right around November 15th.

[kano]

Did a quick off the cuff calculation.  We're currently on block # 202,616 (and likely beyond that by the time you read this) and we move to the 25 BTC Reward at block # 210,000 which is a mere 7,384 blocks from now.  Bitcoin charts currently shows we're doing about 7 blocks/hour.  So, at that rate we're just a smidge under 44 days till the switch to 25 BTC.  ASICs are supposed to start shipping in 20-30 days, so at most, the first ASIC's hashing are going to see the 50 BTC reward for maybe 2-3 weeks, and considering that once they start cranking the blocks are going to come fast and furious for a round or two while the difficulty ramps up, so my guess is those 2-3 weeks get compressed to under a week.

So, just for grins, I'm throwing a guesstimate out there that we'll see the switch to 25 BTC right around November 15th.

Nope - it's 6 blocks an hour.

It doesn't matter what it is at the moment - it matters what it will average over the next 7,000 blocks.
As soon as it hits 2016 blocks, it resets it back to make 10 minutes a block.
With a 10% gain over 2 weeks that will only drop 1.4 days (i.e. 302 hrs instead of 336 hours)
But it will reset after that.
It's quite unlikely to keep going at a constant 10% increase every day for the next 7,000 blocks.

... and to show that point, over the last 7 days (since the last change) it has actually averaged -1.33%

[organofcorti]

Nope - it's 6 blocks an hour.

A little OT but:

Until ASICs come online, yes - 6 blocks an hour. After they come online, and before they reach a steady state, the Network hashrate could rise significantly within a single difficulty period. This would mean blocks being solved much faster than usual, a much shorter difficulty period than usual, and probably an increased number of orphaned blocks.