$504000 per day

[johnyj]

Come on, FED print $40 Billion per month without using any electricity and many people even thank them for doing that

[eyci]

One thing to bear in mind perhaps is that in the long run the block reward goes to zero and miners only receive income from transaction fees. The block rewards they receive now can be seen as a means to bootstrap the entire system by providing incentive to develop the infrastructure.

[drawingthesun]

Just to give us something to compare to, I looked up the financial statement of Visa:

If I am reading it right, in 2012 they had expenses of 2.47 billion dollars, revenue of 10.42 billion dollars, leaving 7.95 billion dollars profits.

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/v/financials

The 118 million per year to miners seems like a lot for a network so much smaller than Visa? I would be surprised if bitcoin was 1% as big as the Visa network, anybody know a good way to measure it?

There can't be a accurate comparison until the transaction fees are the primary source of income for the miners. At the moment all income is skewed because of the mining reward being mostly about the Bitcoin release still. Work out how much is coming in per day/year from the transaction fee and then compare to VISA.

[Littleshop]

One thing to bear in mind perhaps is that in the long run the block reward goes to zero and miners only receive income from transaction fees. The block rewards they receive now can be seen as a means to bootstrap the entire system by providing incentive to develop the infrastructure.

That is exactly what happened.  The network is bootstrapped.  Satoshi was a genius.   While the block reward could be phased down faster then Satoshi's plan and bitcoin would still survive, Satoshi's original plan is the plan that will go forward (THANK YOU!).  

[auzaar]

324000 per day is the revenue what about costs, how many people are sharing it?
suppose 1000 people than 324$ per day revenue is not huge

[vssa]

The miners are currently being paid an equivalent of about $324000 per day through the block reward. (about 90 USD per BTC, 25 BTC per block, 144 blocks per day)

Do you think this amount is a reasonable amount to keep the network going?

The fed creates $268000 in debt per one mined bitcoin .

Do you think this amount is a reasonable amount to keep the system going?

[mjc]

what utter bull, mitty

The mining reward encourages the existence of the network.  With out it your transactions do not get processed.  The fact that the reward is so large, is simply the fact that BTC exchange is so high.  It will equalize as the amount of money flowing in matches the amount going out.  The only reason it is so high is because so many people are buying BTC.  It has NO impact on the network how much the miners make.  I think you can easily get away with sending funds with out transactions or very low transaction fees attached.  The amount miners make from transactions is so small anyways.

[Peter Lambert]

Just to give us something to compare to, I looked up the financial statement of Visa:

If I am reading it right, in 2012 they had expenses of 2.47 billion dollars, revenue of 10.42 billion dollars, leaving 7.95 billion dollars profits.

http://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/v/financials

The 118 million per year to miners seems like a lot for a network so much smaller than Visa? I would be surprised if bitcoin was 1% as big as the Visa network, anybody know a good way to measure it?

There can't be a accurate comparison until the transaction fees are the primary source of income for the miners. At the moment all income is skewed because of the mining reward being mostly about the Bitcoin release still. Work out how much is coming in per day/year from the transaction fee and then compare to VISA.

Right, the revenue of VISA should be compared with the amount miners get from the transaction fee. A better comparison would be to compare the block reward to the amount all the banks around the world spend each day on their computer systems and security systems. Any idea how to estimate that amount?

[Peter Lambert]

The rate the price is jumping is starting to look ridiculous. 50% in one day, there is no way that will continue very long. Looks like we will see the top soon.

[Rampion]

The rate the price is jumping is starting to look ridiculous. 50% in one day, there is no way that will continue very long. Looks like we will see the top soon.

Sooner or later a reasonably large correction is expected, but we're VERY FAR from the top. The game has just started.

[OlgaA524]

The rate the price is jumping is starting to look ridiculous. 50% in one day, there is no way that will continue very long. Looks like we will see the top soon.

When 1 Satoshi = 1$ I'd say this is close to top! At least that is my wishful thinking

[ionux]

Or buy an ASIC rig and enjoy  

^ This is the problem. 

I'm trying to get into mining, but roadblocks are pretty much everywhere.  ASIC's are being only shipped by one vendor, at the moment - Avalon - but in small numbers and those are all spoken for.  Most miners that have been mining a while can afford the $5k,$10k,$20k USD equivalent price (which keeps going up) for those machines due to the demand.  BFL has reasonably priced equipment, but hasn't really shipped anything and, in my opinion, isn't even close to shipping a real product that meets their advertised specs.  FPGA's and GPU's aren't cost effective to invest in at this point, due to the difficulty.  Besides, even if I wanted to buy FPGA's, hardly anyone is selling those anymore, either.

So really, there aren't options for new people interested in mining.  This "decentralized" currency is ending up in the hands of the few that actually have the few ASICs out.   Believe me, I'd love to "buy an ASIC rig and enjoy", but I can't reasonably do that.

Until more vendors are really shipping equipment or turning out more equipment than they have orders to fill, the ability for someone to break into mining now is slim to none.  That is simply the state of the scene right now.

[Rampion]

Or buy an ASIC rig and enjoy  

^ This is the problem. 

I'm trying to get into mining, but roadblocks are pretty much everywhere.  ASIC's are being only shipped by one vendor, at the moment - Avalon - but in small numbers and those are all spoken for.  Most miners that have been mining a while can afford the $5k,$10k,$20k USD equivalent price (which keeps going up) for those machines due to the demand.  BFL has reasonably priced equipment, but hasn't really shipped anything and, in my opinion, isn't even close to shipping a real product that meets their advertised specs.  FPGA's and GPU's aren't cost effective to invest in at this point, due to the difficulty.  Besides, even if I wanted to buy FPGA's, hardly anyone is selling those anymore, either.

So really, there aren't options for new people interested in mining.  This "decentralized" currency is ending up in the hands of the few that actually have the few ASICs out.   Believe me, I'd love to "buy an ASIC rig and enjoy", but I can't reasonably do that.

Until more vendors are really shipping equipment or turning out more equipment than they have orders to fill, the ability for someone to break into mining now is slim to none.  That is simply the state of the scene right now.

Buy as main BTC as possible while waiting ASICs second gen to order as soon as its announced. It will be a gamble, but the reward will be much higher

[ionux]

Buy as main BTC as possible while waiting ASICs second gen to order as soon as its announced. It will be a gamble, but the reward will be much higher

Buying BTC at $130 is a huge gamble and unrealistic for a most people.  If I had the money to invest considerably in BTC at the current prices, I'd pony up for an existing ASIC.  But, as it stands, the mtgox price is down 2% already.

I think the takeaway for me is, I should have got into mining earlier and/or bought bitcoins at $10.  Just missed the boat.  Nobody to blame but myself.

[Rampion]

Buy as main BTC as possible while waiting ASICs second gen to order as soon as its announced. It will be a gamble, but the reward will be much higher

Buying BTC at $130 is a huge gamble and unrealistic for a most people.  If I had the money to invest considerably in BTC at the current prices, I'd pony up for an existing ASIC.  But, as it stands, the mtgox price is down 2% already.

I think the takeaway for me is, I should have got into mining earlier and/or bought bitcoins at $10.  Just missed the boat.  Nobody to blame but myself.

Excuse me but that's BS. I buy BTC at all prices, as soon as I get my paycheck, and it's been months now. What's expensive? I guarantee you that when I was buying at 14, 25, 33 or 65 something in my stomach was telling me "what a pity, now is more expensive", just because I knew that just a few months earlier it was WAY cheaper.

But you know what? My brain and my analysis always told me: THIS IS CHEAP COINS

And $140 it's still very cheap coins.

Wake up: there are only 11MBTC in circulation, and there will be a maximum of 21MBTC.

BUY

[superdork]

"Bad guys" will always have access to ASICs, one can't simply pretend away that threat.  Today if someone wanted to attack Bitcoin they wouldn't build a GPU farm they would fab some chips and build a smaller easier to manage ASIC farm.  It wouldn't matter if BFL and Avalon didn't exist an attacker would STILL go that route because it is the most economical.

Yep, but even "Bad Guys" have enemies/competitors that will counter-attack by supporting the network.

BINGO!!

Greed is a powerful thing. I doubt that there is only one entity going hard into ASICs, it will balance out.

[northcape]

Buy as main BTC as possible while waiting ASICs second gen to order as soon as its announced. It will be a gamble, but the reward will be much higher

Buying BTC at $130 is a huge gamble and unrealistic for a most people.  If I had the money to invest considerably in BTC at the current prices, I'd pony up for an existing ASIC.  But, as it stands, the mtgox price is down 2% already.

I think the takeaway for me is, I should have got into mining earlier and/or bought bitcoins at $10.  Just missed the boat.  Nobody to blame but myself.

What if you read this in a couple years when one BTC trades for $1000, $2000 or even more?
Sure it may not seem realistic right now but can you rule it out?

[Operatr]

As the currency war progresses, and Bitcoin keeps expanding, miners will be forced to start using their coin to buy the necessary hardware to stay competitive. Until now it was more or less a garage experiment that no one predicted would do what it's doing now. There was simply nothing much to do with BTC after you mined it in the early days as no one accepted them really, so it has just been piling up in these accounts a while.

But that is changing now with more and more merchants hopping on board, and competition due to the ASIC wave that is inbound will increase dramatically. Garage GPU mines will either move forward in the new industry and throw down the big bucks to go Pro, move to Litecoin/Terracoin or some other BTC derived economy, or just sell their rigs and shut down altogether.

Such short term thinking, keep focus on the larger picture and the Bitcoin protocol's viability looks a lot rosier. We are about to enter the big leagues here and will involve serious capital, spending within the network will increase as merchants make that available. I'm just waiting for a company like Newegg to start accepting them which will propel Bitcoin's legitimacy, and the real game will begin.

This is just the beginning of something like likes of which the world has never seen, I myself am going all in.

[spacegoat]

hey friends, TRC was hit by one of the asics and is lagging and they put in a historical fix, and we just need to get through 2 Blocks, and we will be out of our bind.  but the increased difficulty has scared the miners away, if anyone could spare any mining power for half an hour for the TRC cause, it would be so helpful right now.

thank you

and I know TRC doesn't belong over on BTC

[Operatr]

hey friends, TRC was hit by one of the asics and is lagging and they put in a historical fix, and we just need to get through 2 Blocks, and we will be out of our bind.  but the increased difficulty has scared the miners away, if anyone could spare any mining power for half an hour for the TRC cause, it would be so helpful right now.

thank you

and I know TRC doesn't belong over on BTC

That will be a problem for the budding sub-currencies under Bitcoin as these super powerful devices come online. Those markets are too fragile to power dump on. Bitcoin went through a natural progression in size and computing power. LTC/TRC may have some headache as that high level tech is being applied to it way too early.