:

[chodpaba]

:

[wareen]

Thanks again for sharing your insights - they are much appreciated!

[DarkKnightNomeD]

Everyone Reply to this post, keep it bumped and what not

at the current rate we have 6+ days till difficulty jumps again?

would coins have to be 45 to 55 dollars to keep the same rate of profit?

[TraderTimm]

If the same ratio to difficulty is maintained, the median forecast of:

847013

Would indeed require price to be at the 46 - 50 level.

Interesting times ahead.

[Dhomochevsky]

Well, at this current rate of block discovery the reward per block will halve sometime late spring next year. I'd imagine the dropoff point for mining you predict to come soon after. Of course, this all depends on how the amount of paid transactions per block will evolve by then, but in such a short timeframe I don't think it will fully replace the 25 BTC that will be missing from the reward. Even if it's not such a big setback, even if it can be considered a 100% jump in difficulty, I think it will still have a noticeable psychological effect on the hashing power.

But right now, mining has a ridiculously high ROI. Even if the BTC price stagnates all the way through the next difficulty threshold (which, based on the current estimation and network growth, I'd imagine to be somewhere around the lower quartile you mentioned) you still get a ~30% monthly ROI, which is extremely high. Therefore mining is a pretty viable endeavour for the time being. And if the BTC prices will continue to rise (even at a slow rate), this will still be the case for quite some time from now on.

[finnthecelt]

If the same ratio to difficulty is maintained, the median forecast of:

847013

Would indeed require price to be at the 46 - 50 level.

Interesting times ahead.

You can not really count on that though. A large price jump can cause a sharp increase in Difficulty weeks later, even as price is correcting downward. So, to count on an increase in price to make up for fewer blocks is a bit of a double-bind. Don't count your chickens and all that... We would all be in a more profitable position, in terms of Bitcoins, if price rose at a slower rate. But as things are now it could be years before the state of the mining art catches up with the expectations of new miners. I totally expect a lot of miners will drop off by the end of next year, and a year after that there will be a new mining renaissance that will put this one to shame.

I find your insights more interesting and thoughtful the more I read them. I've been leaning towards selling my BTC until I paid my rigs off but lately have been reconsidering. The more I learn about BTC the more I appreciate it. I can envision BTC being incredibly valuable but have a sense of great risk as well (Spidy sense!!).

I don't need the cash and can pay the electric bill with my day job.

I've heard a lot of numbers being bandied about regarding how long mining will continue....is there a definitive on this. 2 years.....20 years?