Now Bitcoin mining becomes much less profitable

[freebeer2go]

yeah difficulty will skyrocket, 10M by end of the month.

[Yorky]

Yeah everyone's on the bandwagon now.

I've got a friend who's just bought a mining computer from America.

That shows how big bitcoin is.

I didn't even think that any of my friends would ever hear of bitcoins let alone mine!!

[Schrankwand]

It would be interesting to see the effects of ASICs.

I am in for a 25GH Single SC, and my main concern is getting break even. That is all I want first.


BFL Josh said something about them ahving "only" 75k chips, with each chip at about 800MH/s

SO this is probably a fun reality: 75.000 times 800mh/s equals a hashing power of about 60000GH, aka 60TH hitting the market.
I doubt the others are that far yet, although I see some FPGA developers chipping in creating more power.

If we would suggest that 30-40% of people nowadays are still GPU miners and they had to stop, that would make about 20-25GH/s of Hash rate right now.

Let us say Avalon Ships, increases the next batches with another 20GH/s. We would end up at... 80-100GH/s entering the market in bulk, with about 20-25GH/s leaving it, because their electricity bill won't be paid anymore.

Until GPU miners have recouped their sold cards, we would be at an increase of about 80GH/s this year. This would double the hashing power. Bitcoins are given out by a pretty much fixed margin. The difficulty would therefore have to reflect this change EQUALLY.

Meaning, that if you had 1% in the market before, and you have 1% of the hashing power now, nothing changes. What changes, and that is an interesting way of showing evolution in non-biological sense (red queen theory): If you want to keep making the same amount of Bitcoin until the next cut off, you need to keep adding hashing power in linear proportion to the overall network has increase.

More or less. So yes, of course it becomes less profitable. What you have to calculate is the following: The cost of equipment necessary and its time until it breaks even. If this timeframe becomes too big, it sucks. If this timeframe to break even stays in the 3 month range, like right now: Who gives a damn if the network gets bigger. You just need to keep ahead and keep adding a well calculated portion of your profits to stay at the same percentage of network hashing power to stay profitable.

[Minas3d]

Anyone still mining Bitcoin with a standard system is wasting their time and money, that ship sailed long ago. The smartest thing to do if you still want to mine is to jump on younger currencies like PPCoin or Terracoin if you don't think they're scams. But really, SHA-256 is a dead end, once ASICs are commonplace, all SHA-256 currencies will be out of the hands of regular people, the best bet is to jump on Scrypt based currencies like Litecoin, they are ASIC immune, and you can still make money with a decent rig. Mining though is limited anyway, it's probably better just to drop some Fiat on Litecoins/Bitcoins directly through an exchange and trade on the market, you're more liable to earn a profit that way.

[sal002]

Anyone still mining Bitcoin with a standard system is wasting their time and money, that ship sailed long ago. The smartest thing to do if you still want to mine is to jump on younger currencies like PPCoin or Terracoin if you don't think they're scams. But really, SHA-256 is a dead end, once ASICs are commonplace, all SHA-256 currencies will be out of the hands of regular people, the best bet is to jump on Scrypt based currencies like Litecoin, they are ASIC immune, and you can still make money with a decent rig. Mining though is limited anyway, it's probably better just to drop some Fiat on Litecoins/Bitcoins directly through an exchange and trade on the market, you're more liable to earn a profit that way.

The link I posted above to the other thread here contains a program that not only automatically switches to the most profitable coin, automatically converts back to BTC....Freicoin is up over 200% of the profitability of BTC right now with Litecoin and PPCoin marginally more profitable.

[Gws24]

You could also buy some chips from avalon: http://store.avalon-asics.com/?page_id=9605. Ofcourse you need to buy 10k chips at a time and build your own pcb and software etc  .

For most of us that is obviously not an option financially and technically but there is a DIY project underway here on the forum which uses the avalon chips: DIY PCB with AVALON - [Proposed BOM V1] with the chips being bought by one member and then distibuted [ANN] Avalon ASIC chip distribution

[Rippyzippers]

Any money I was going to spend on a mining rig I've since spent on ASICMINER Shares.

The payments are nice so far, But I wonder if in the long run they are only going to go up or down.

[ning]

Not if you are friedcat.

[vader1671]

Such a pity.