>Now, when the 40% upgraded their mining operations, their 40 petahash became 160 petahash for the same watts.
The hashrate represents *additional* hashpower from new gear. Last gen hardware is still profitable to mine (other pig farmers are running it, so must be).
Yes but you are not buying obsolete hardware when the halvening is around the corner. That won't even make you a ROI for the hardware.
Also unreasonable to assume that all of the extra hashpower is from new gen chips -- that would imply that the rest of chip manufacturers/gear manufacturers have sold exactly no product since the new BitFury chips hit the market. Pretty difficult to swallow, because doesn't jive with reality.
Yeah the assumption is just to illustrate the example. It's not how actual mining works. In reality, it's about +1 or +2 generation backwards... there could be a lot of 50+ nm chips mining along with 20nm+ chips, and what will probably go out the window are the 50nm+. Even very old hardware can be profitable if electricity is at near zero cost, but, at some point, it won't be. Although that doesn't mean they represent any serious hashrate (by the time they are out).
The 16nm story is just an example of how there is evolution in terms of performance, as well as lower consumption - which allows to produce same hashrates with much less equipment, automatically reducing the % of slice of the pie (in terms of hashrate) that belongs to old mining hardware.
Well yeah, that doesn't work because everyone else is mining your spot too, some with picks and pans, some with dredges just like yours. As you mentioned, more of your fancy dredges came over in the past five months. As n 3x more
Now your newfangled dredge is dredging only 1/3 (one third) as many digital pigs as it did just 5 months ago. And come teh Halvening, it's gonna be *less than 1/6th* (because not just Halvening, but also more dredges showed up to dredge your spot in the meantime).
So yeah, to say that the Halvening is gonna be devastating is an understatement.
It's gonna be *disruptive*
Again, I seriously doubt that hashrate representing 2/3 of the network, and which comes online months before the halvening, will be ...obsolete. The "ground" is the same, but at least you are "not burning that much diesel to get the gold" - so better hardware allow more profitability for the remaining players, even with a halvening event...
Personally I don't expect more than a 15-25% hash slowdown if price levels are >400. It could be far less with prices at 500-600 or beyond but problematic if price goes down to 200. And there are bonus circumstances which could help, like further chinese devaluation which could make electricity costs in china even cheaper in USD$ terms. The miner is getting paid in USD but his costs in USD get lower due to CNY going lower. I think since summer it went down from 1 USD to 6.2 CNY to 6.5 CNY, which is around a 5% slide. I have no idea if electric costs remained the same (in CNY terms), but if they did, it's automatically +5% more profitable since the main revenue stream is USD.
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