When do you think miners will start to switch to altcoins?

[Jet Cash]

With the halving progressing, difficulty increasing, and resistance to transaction fees increasing, it is becoming harder to turn a profit from mining. I gather some banks are now unwilling to provide finance to miners to upgrade their rigs. Do you think this will lead to miners turning some of their attention to alt coins? What effect do you think this will have on transaction confirmation times?

Edited by me -

In this thread, I'm referring to the large mining groups and companies that control the mining of Bitcoin. I'm aware that they have already pushed smaller miners over to altcoin mining, or have forced them out of mining.

[s@toshiClaims]

i think small miner do this already long time... its not profitable to mine bitcoins or you need to invest over 30000$ dollars to have a good mining farm.. Its better to mine on a new promising altcoin and hope the price will rise 10x 30x ..

[bacloud]

Yep, I agree. Some of miners already work on altcoins and hope to have good profit.
I am not sure that the altcoins will become popular, but there are some possibilities.

[unamis76]

Small miners do it all the time. Big miners might reserve some energy resources for altcoins if the gamble pays off in short-term. Both will never completely leave Bitcoin, I think, especially the big miners which will always have most of their stake on Bitcoin. That being said, I highly doubt altcoin mining will have a surge of people after the halving.

[1Referee]

Where have you been the last few years? Miners mine anything that makes them profit. It's nothing new.

[gregyoung14]

Where have you been the last few years? Miners mine anything that makes them profit. It's nothing new.

So mean to say im not the only one who thinks there is something wrong with the question. There are miners for anything everywhere.

[Bitcoiner2015]

with ASICs or with GPUs?
I think they already have partially switched with ASICs, and those with GPUs have all long since switched over!

[Jet Cash]

OK - I should have qualified my statement. What I meant were the large miners that everybody seems to think control the destiny of Bitcoin.

Sorry about the lack of clarification in the OP. I guess I need to do more experimenting with alt coins.

[ATguy]

Do you think this will lead to miners turning some of their attention to alt coins?

There are not much liquid options for SHA256 algo, by the time you mine and can sell the coins the price of such altcoin can be down and you might be worse than just mining Bitcoin. As a small SHA256 miner myselves, I dont find mining such temporary higher price / GH effort altcoins worth the risk to take.

If highly unprofitable to mine when halving come, they eighter temporary stop or sell the mining equipment imo

[Jet Cash]

Do you think this will lead to miners turning some of their attention to alt coins?

There are not much liquid options for SHA256 algo, by the time you mine and can sell the coins the price of such altcoin can be down and you might be worse than just mining Bitcoin. As a small SHA256 miner myselves, I dont find mining such temporary higher price / GH effort altcoins worth the risk to take.

If highly unprofitable to mine when halving come, they eighter temporary stop or sell the mining equipment imo

Thanks for that post. Do you think that they may sell the mining equipment to the volume transaction generators? I think this would be a good outcome, as it would increase mining diversification.

[Amph]

what altcoin is more profitable for the giant chinese sha256 miners other than bitcoin? notice the sha256, it's not like with their asic they can mine eth for example

miners will simply increase the efficiency this alone can hold off the halving, also the value now it's not 2xx but 4xx, it is also true that the diff is greater, by 2x....

[DannyHamilton]

What effect do you think this will have on transaction confirmation times?

It shouldn't have any significant effect.

It is possible, if a few percent of the total global hash power is all taken offline in the same 2 week period, that the average time between blocks might temporarily increase by that same percentage, but the increase will be so small that the normal variation in block time distribution will mean that the increase will only be noticeable when looking at the total time for hundreds of blocks to occur. Then, after the next difficulty adjustment, the difficulty will drop and the average block time will return to 10 minutes.

Imagine 10% of the entire global hash power all being removed from the network within the same 2 week adjustment period.  As an extreme case, imagine that entire 10% is all removed moments after a difficulty adjustment:

The average time between blocks would increase from 10 minutes to 11 minutes. Since the time between any 2 blocks is random, there are already blocks that take much less than 10 minutes, and blocks that take much more than 10 minutes.  So for the first few hundred blocks it will be impossible to tell if the average block time has actually increased, or if it is simply a case of a few random blocks happening to be longer than 10 minutes.

The total time for 300 hundred blocks will probably be somewhere around 3300 minutes instead of somewhere around 3000 minutes, but if it's 3150 minutes, how would you tell if hash power has been removed, or if this is just normal variation on 10 minute blocks?  As the total number of blocks increases, it will become more and more obvious that blocks aren't occuring quite as fast as  they used to.

The entire 2016 block adjustment period will take about 33.5 hours longer than usual, so instead of difficulty adjusting after close to 14 days, it will adjust after a bit less than 15.5 days.  At that point the average time between blocks will return to 10 minutes.

[calkob]

i currently do mine an altcoin, i only get 0.5 a day but that is a lot more then i would get if i directly mined bitcoin.

[Hellacopter]

I think if the price of some used altcoins get highest level many miners will start to switch to mining this altcoins, because it's profitable for them. Otherwise it's worthless so i think everything is depending in the altcoin's price

[BTCBinary]

I think they already did. Since bitcoin mining is bvecoming increasingly difficult a lotoof miners have turned into altcoins because they have mauch more profits than with mining bitcoin.

[romero121]

I don't they will face a high difficulty and switch on to alternative coins, because nowhere they get such profit as well secured. Those alternative coins emerged from bitcoin. Being with bitcoin seems to be the best.

[tiggytomb]

I think we already see a lot of miners doing both bitcoin and altcoins already as some altcoins can be a lot more profitable than mining bitcoin, one example could be Genesis Mining, they have been offering altcoin mining for a while now.
For the smaller miners altcoins would be the best option for a nice return. 

Myself I don't own any rigs but will on occasion rent a rig to mine some altcoins.

[DimensionZ]

The miners will mine whatever makes them the most profit I guess. I think it's a bad idea to rely on banks to get loans for buying mining equipment because it could turn out it won't make enough money to even break even and they could end up in debt easily instead.

[Jet Cash]

The miners will mine whatever makes them the most profit I guess. I think it's a bad idea to rely on banks to get loans for buying mining equipment because it could turn out it won't make enough money to even break even and they could end up in debt easily instead.

I agree with that, and that is probably the reason some banks have withdrawn from funding miners. This means they must be aware that profits are marginal at best - hence my thoughts on there being a gradual move away from Bitcoin mining. Hopefully this will be replaced by a shift towards small mining operations by some of the larger service providers as they see an opportunity to make/save money.

[pedrog]

Never heard of banks granting loans for mining operations...

Bitcoin miners cannot simply change to altcoins, hardware is highly specialized and they are probably already merge mining other sha256 coins, it gives a little bit more profit.

If some altcoin becomes valuable enough people will invest in hardware to mine it, remember doge?