Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine.

[[Coins!]]

Again...most speculator who have stated the exact same thing in the past ended up being wrong.  Always factoring in difficulty increase but always assuming a stagnant or declining value.  Really though nobody knows what will happen. 

Can you show me where they were wrong?  The increases in difficulty are shown here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc

6/26  40%
6/15 54%
6/6 30%
5/26 78%
5/18 55%
5/9 43%


I mean really.  The last month has been huge, and you can see that only 2x on that chart has it been negative, and a few negatives are more than cancelled out by 300% and 78% increases, lmao.

[Swishercutter]

Again...most speculator who have stated the exact same thing in the past ended up being wrong.  Always factoring in difficulty increase but always assuming a stagnant or declining value.  Really though nobody knows what will happen. 

Can you show me where they were wrong?  The increases in difficulty are shown here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc

6/26  40%
6/15 54%
6/6 30%
5/26 78%
5/18 55%
5/9 43%


I mean really.  The last month has been huge, and you can see that only 2x on that chart has it been negative, and a few negatives are more than cancelled out by 300% and 78% increases, lmao.

Not talking about the difficulty increase...they all said mining would stop being profitable by X date...they so far have been wrong...it might be less profitable but still making money.

[[Coins!]]

Not talking about the difficulty increase...they all said mining would stop being profitable by X date...they so far have been wrong...it might be less profitable but still making money.

So, without new hardware hitting the market, and given 6 30-50% difficulty increases from now to mid-late August, you say it will still be profitable to make bitcoins.

That would require the price of bitcoins to match the difficulty rate, right?

So far that isn't exactly happening, since price depends on demand, not difficulty.

[Swishercutter]

Not talking about the difficulty increase...they all said mining would stop being profitable by X date...they so far have been wrong...it might be less profitable but still making money.

So, without new hardware hitting the market, and given 6 30-50% difficulty increases from now to mid-late August, you say it will still be profitable to make bitcoins.

That would require the price of bitcoins to match the difficulty rate, right?

So far that isn't exactly happening, since price depends on demand, not difficulty.

Cool...but how is this new?

[[Coins!]]

Cool...but how is this new?

I am asking for you to toss out some numbers to back up your claims : )

You can't just say 'I am right' nor 'Others were wrong in the past, therefore I am right'.

What would Bitcoins need to be worth, given a 7,000,000 + difficulty, to be profitable?

[Swishercutter]

Cool...but how is this new?

I am asking for you to toss out some numbers to back up your claims : )

You can't just say 'I am right' nor 'Others were wrong in the past, therefore I am right'.

What would Bitcoins need to be worth, given a 7,000,000 + difficulty, to be profitable?

I do not need numbers...people said the exact same thing you are saying now 6mos ago...mining continues to turn a profit currently.  My OPINION is that speculators (and myself) have no idea.  Proof of this is in the past threads.

It does however make me wonder why you seem so intent on swaying people from mining...I honestly am not trying to get people to do it, I am just pointing out the flaws in most naysayers...always come with a bunch of numbers that do not take into account value increase.

By your logic mining was never profitable...you do know most early adopters were eating their hardware/power cost while everyone was telling them they were stupid and that BTC would never be worth anything...now everyone is saying the only people who can make money are the early adopters...it gets more and more stupid...everyone thinks they can predict the future behavior of a group of humans by using a bunch of hardware/difficulty calculations.

If you are right...great...I still won't care.  It won't change my decision...just as I hope others come to their own conclusions.


NEVER risk anything more than you can afford to lose, ever...and everything has levels of risk.

[[Coins!]]

I do not need numbers...people said the exact same thing you are saying now 6mos ago...mining continues to turn a profit currently.  My OPINION is that speculators (and myself) have no idea.  Proof of this is in the past threads.

It does however make me wonder why you seem so intent on swaying people from mining...I honestly am not trying to get people to do it, I am just pointing out the flaws in most naysayers...always come with a bunch of numbers that do not take into account value increase.

By your logic mining was never profitable...you do know most early adopters were eating their hardware/power cost while everyone was telling them they were stupid and that BTC would never be worth anything...now everyone is saying the only people who can make money are the early adopters...it gets more and more stupid...everyone thinks they can predict the future behavior of a group of humans by using a bunch of hardware/difficulty calculations.

If you are right...great...I still won't care.  It won't change my decision...just as I hope others come to their own conclusions.

NEVER risk anything more than you can afford to lose, ever...and everything has levels of risk.

See for me, I am GPU mining with 1 card.  You can look up my total net worth by copying my signature link and putting it into block explorer.

I am on these forums to discuss rationally and logically with people about bitcoins.  I am not promoting hysteria, but I am also not promoting blind faith.  People who say "I don't need numbers" are the ones I really begin to question.  "It worked in the past!" These logical fallacies are exactly the wrong way to discuss Bitcoins.  

You claim that value increase is being discounted, but I specifically asked you to put forth what value increase is necessary to keep things as profitable as you claim they will be.  I see that I cannot engage you in logical discussions, so I will bow out.

[Swishercutter]

I do not need numbers...people said the exact same thing you are saying now 6mos ago...mining continues to turn a profit currently.  My OPINION is that speculators (and myself) have no idea.  Proof of this is in the past threads.

It does however make me wonder why you seem so intent on swaying people from mining...I honestly am not trying to get people to do it, I am just pointing out the flaws in most naysayers...always come with a bunch of numbers that do not take into account value increase.

By your logic mining was never profitable...you do know most early adopters were eating their hardware/power cost while everyone was telling them they were stupid and that BTC would never be worth anything...now everyone is saying the only people who can make money are the early adopters...it gets more and more stupid...everyone thinks they can predict the future behavior of a group of humans by using a bunch of hardware/difficulty calculations.

If you are right...great...I still won't care.  It won't change my decision...just as I hope others come to their own conclusions.

NEVER risk anything more than you can afford to lose, ever...and everything has levels of risk.

See for me, I am GPU mining with 1 card.  You can look up my total net worth by copying my signature link and putting it into block explorer.

I am on these forums to discuss rationally and logically with people about bitcoins.  I am not promoting hysteria, but I am also not promoting blind faith.  People who say "I don't need numbers" are the ones I really begin to question.  "It worked in the past!" These logical fallacies are exactly the wrong way to discuss Bitcoins.  

You claim that value increase is being discounted, but I specifically asked you to put forth what value increase is necessary to keep things as profitable as you claim they will be.  I see that I cannot engage you in logical discussions, so I will bow out.

Probably a good idea for both of us...I have no numbers (I am speculating...I could be wrong and I still would turn a profit somehow) and I was starting to wonder if I was talking to a machine with an extra goto 10 line in the wrong spot.

[nebiki]

I do not need numbers...people said the exact same thing you are saying now 6mos ago...mining continues to turn a profit currently.  My OPINION is that speculators (and myself) have no idea.  Proof of this is in the past threads.

It does however make me wonder why you seem so intent on swaying people from mining...I honestly am not trying to get people to do it, I am just pointing out the flaws in most naysayers...always come with a bunch of numbers that do not take into account value increase.

By your logic mining was never profitable...you do know most early adopters were eating their hardware/power cost while everyone was telling them they were stupid and that BTC would never be worth anything...now everyone is saying the only people who can make money are the early adopters...it gets more and more stupid...everyone thinks they can predict the future behavior of a group of humans by using a bunch of hardware/difficulty calculations.

If you are right...great...I still won't care.  It won't change my decision...just as I hope others come to their own conclusions.

NEVER risk anything more than you can afford to lose, ever...and everything has levels of risk.

See for me, I am GPU mining with 1 card.  You can look up my total net worth by copying my signature link and putting it into block explorer.

I am on these forums to discuss rationally and logically with people about bitcoins.  I am not promoting hysteria, but I am also not promoting blind faith.  People who say "I don't need numbers" are the ones I really begin to question.  "It worked in the past!" These logical fallacies are exactly the wrong way to discuss Bitcoins.  

You claim that value increase is being discounted, but I specifically asked you to put forth what value increase is necessary to keep things as profitable as you claim they will be.  I see that I cannot engage you in logical discussions, so I will bow out.

Probably a good idea for both of us...I have no numbers (I am speculating...I could be wrong and I still would turn a profit somehow) and I was starting to wonder if I was talking to a machine with an extra goto 10 line in the wrong spot.

i love people who always go all-in with each pair. gotta love them.

[Swishercutter]

I do not need numbers...people said the exact same thing you are saying now 6mos ago...mining continues to turn a profit currently.  My OPINION is that speculators (and myself) have no idea.  Proof of this is in the past threads.

It does however make me wonder why you seem so intent on swaying people from mining...I honestly am not trying to get people to do it, I am just pointing out the flaws in most naysayers...always come with a bunch of numbers that do not take into account value increase.

By your logic mining was never profitable...you do know most early adopters were eating their hardware/power cost while everyone was telling them they were stupid and that BTC would never be worth anything...now everyone is saying the only people who can make money are the early adopters...it gets more and more stupid...everyone thinks they can predict the future behavior of a group of humans by using a bunch of hardware/difficulty calculations.

If you are right...great...I still won't care.  It won't change my decision...just as I hope others come to their own conclusions.

NEVER risk anything more than you can afford to lose, ever...and everything has levels of risk.

See for me, I am GPU mining with 1 card.  You can look up my total net worth by copying my signature link and putting it into block explorer.

I am on these forums to discuss rationally and logically with people about bitcoins.  I am not promoting hysteria, but I am also not promoting blind faith.  People who say "I don't need numbers" are the ones I really begin to question.  "It worked in the past!" These logical fallacies are exactly the wrong way to discuss Bitcoins.  

You claim that value increase is being discounted, but I specifically asked you to put forth what value increase is necessary to keep things as profitable as you claim they will be.  I see that I cannot engage you in logical discussions, so I will bow out.

Probably a good idea for both of us...I have no numbers (I am speculating...I could be wrong and I still would turn a profit somehow) and I was starting to wonder if I was talking to a machine with an extra goto 10 line in the wrong spot.

i love people who always go all-in with each pair. gotta love them.

I've been in worse boats than this one and come out ahead...I will use the computers for Adobe in my other business if this fails...so they will make me money regardless...I have a gaming rig I have not used in 3 months (not due to bitcoin, I just got in, I have just been to busy to play).

[gigitrix]

Mining sucks and you guys should totally never check my signature!


Mining is fine. It's following the same trends it always has.

[Swishercutter]

Mining sucks and you guys should totally never check my signature!


Mining is fine. It's following the same trends it always has.

But where are your numbers and spreadshits...don't you need those to be right?

[gat3way]

It's kind of dilemma for me. What kind of propaganda post should I put in here. Well, definitely more newcomers means less profits due to the higher difficulty. On the other hand, I have other GPU-related stuff to do and I wouldn't mind naive idiots selling their new GPUs cheap en masse.

Any advice?

[bcpokey]

Again...most speculator who have stated the exact same thing in the past ended up being wrong.  Always factoring in difficulty increase but always assuming a stagnant or declining value.  Really though nobody knows what will happen. 

Can you show me where they were wrong?  The increases in difficulty are shown here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc

6/26  40%
6/15 54%
6/6 30%
5/26 78%
5/18 55%
5/9 43%


I mean really.  The last month has been huge, and you can see that only 2x on that chart has it been negative, and a few negatives are more than cancelled out by 300% and 78% increases, lmao.

I thought I already went over this, but anyway. You can't use a select portion of data and claim that it is correct. Every one of those huge jumps in difficulty followed (FOLLOWED) a huge jump in price. The small stagnation of 30% was following a moderate trend up of price after a huge jump of difficulty. Difficulty has followed the money as it should. We are still in the throes of the largest price increase in bitcoins relatively short history bringing in a flux of the largest amount of miners in the history of bitcoin. It is not a coincidence that after a huge trend upwards of mining power around the the difficulty time change (lag time in buying / installing new parts) the hashrate of the networks upward trend slowed significantly. There still is inertia and this will likely cause a continuation of reasonable increase into the next difficulty due to lagtime of mining response, but unless something drastically positive happens (bitcoin price jump or something) the increase will almost certainly level out again until the next big event.

I've already told you specifically what is wrong with those spreadsheets. They enlist static numbers, based on only a very select group of data used to prove the point they are trying to make. That is called selection bias. I'm still not arguing that mining is the best thing since sliced bread, profitability is way way way down due to a number of factors, but all these projection claims that don't include the tag "btw I have no idea if my assumptions will hold true because there is not enough data to allow for any kind of reasonableness" are fallacious.

Warnings: Good. Claiming speculation as fact: Bad.

[nebiki]

i've done a simulation in which the average total hashrate increase rate is -4% (2nd derivation). looks awesome to me and more reasonable. maybe it actually is a good idea to keep on building rigs. i mean, you can't expect the network speed to increase at this rate for much longer. first reason, it's exponential. that means more and more investments would have to be made. but i doubt people will invest more _now_ than let's say a week ago. the average "gamer" won't buy an additional AMD card anymore just to increase his hashrate. maybe he won't mine at all (nvidia?), because the profit is not as obvious as it was in the past few weeks. there's still reasonable hope for investments to pay for themselves. i am actually thinking about getting a second card. would be so awesome to let it pay for itself and use it for gaming in a few months. crossfire :3

[AngelusWebDesign]

2 TERAHASHES of capacity have been added to the network just in the last 5 days. That was after Bitcoin went down in value to $17 (so much for "difficulty follows price"!)

The two difficulty decreases were long before most of us knew what a Bitcoin was.

[bcpokey]

2 TERAHASHES of capacity have been added to the network just in the last 5 days. That was after Bitcoin went down in value to $17 (so much for "difficulty follows price"!)

The two difficulty decreases were long before most of us knew what a Bitcoin was.

Curiousity: Are you just wrong all the time, or are you purposefully putting out misinformation all the time? Difficulty/hashing follows price, but not immediately. That's why it's been repeatedly called a lagging indicator. It takes days/weeks for people to get their mining equipment delivered, all together, unboxed, put together, installed, up and running, stable and overclocked. The Price Jump to $30 was the biggest bitcoin had ever seen, and with a slurry of news reports inspired a huge rush of people to overextend themselves buying machines (look at beeph for example, dropping > $10,000 because bitcoin was free moniez forever!). Difficulty jumped *right* afterwards. It will jump again, THEN we will start to see price/difficulty effects as people decide whether or not its worth their investment to continue or return based on price vs. difficulty.

A side note, 2THash/sec used to be a lot, now it's 20% of the network power.

[AngelusWebDesign]

It sure seems like more cards are coming online every day, quite a while after the $30 BTC days.

I guess it's possible that not everyone gets cards mining as fast as me...but still! A couple weeks? A few weeks?

When was it last $30? That seems like forever ago.

[[Coins!]]

i've done a simulation in which the average total hashrate increase rate is -4% (2nd derivation). looks awesome to me and more reasonable. maybe it actually is a good idea to keep on building rigs. i mean, you can't expect the network speed to increase at this rate for much longer. first reason, it's exponential. that means more and more investments would have to be made. but i doubt people will invest more _now_ than let's say a week ago. the average "gamer" won't buy an additional AMD card anymore just to increase his hashrate. maybe he won't mine at all (nvidia?), because the profit is not as obvious as it was in the past few weeks. there's still reasonable hope for investments to pay for themselves. i am actually thinking about getting a second card. would be so awesome to let it pay for itself and use it for gaming in a few months. crossfire :3

Could you post your simulation so we can look at it?  I am looking at the difficulty/time spreadsheet I posted above and the 'average total hashrate' is never -4% across any trends I've seen.

I agree it would be awesome for cards to pay for themselves, and I hope mine does pay for itself.  Closing in on I think 4 bitcoins soon.  I still need 20 total to get it to pay for itself, and my math shows that won't happen.  I don't mind, but I am just saying baseless optimism is not the way to go toward BTCs.  I bought my card for gaming too, so up or down, I don't care.  However, for people that are blowing $10,000 on mining, and not understanding that the difficulty is continuing to increase in under 12 days per difficulty, they need to re-examine their calculations.

Curiousity: Are you just wrong all the time, or are you purposefully putting out misinformation all the time? Difficulty/hashing follows price, but not immediately. That's why it's been repeatedly called a lagging indicator. It takes days/weeks for people to get their mining equipment delivered, all together, unboxed, put together, installed, up and running, stable and overclocked. The Price Jump to $30 was the biggest bitcoin had ever seen, and with a slurry of news reports inspired a huge rush of people to overextend themselves buying machines (look at beeph for example, dropping > $10,000 because bitcoin was free moniez forever!). Difficulty jumped *right* afterwards. It will jump again, THEN we will start to see price/difficulty effects as people decide whether or not its worth their investment to continue or return based on price vs. difficulty.

A side note, 2THash/sec used to be a lot, now it's 20% of the network power.

Regardless of what follows what, difficulty has been going up, quite steadily.  The next increase will likely be around 50%.  It only takes 6 such increases of 30-50% for me to no longer have an incentive to mine, because a difficulty in the range of 7Mil means my single GPU is just spinning its cycles fruitlessly.

I really hope people are objectively, and not subjectively looking at the trends, the media attention, and the numbers.

[minor_miner]

The problem is that an ASIC can be custom designed to go orders of magnitude faster than a GPU for a specific task.  As just a very rough estimate, one SHA256 engine with bitcoin hash difficulty detection would take something like 1 million transistors.  The latest ASIC technology allows 2 billion transistors.  So that would allow 2,000 of these engines per chip.  If you layed them out by hand, you could probably get them up to 4 GHz.  Assuming one hash per clock, this ends up being 8 TH/S per chip.  In other words, this one chip could outperform the entire current BitCoin network.  And once the multi-million up front tooling costs are covered, you can make each chip for $50 each.  So for another $10,000 you could make a system with 200 chips that would be able to dominate the entire network at 200 times its current capacity.

If these numbers are true, the whole Bitcoin system is doomed.

If one entity possesses more than 50% of the processing power, it can dominate everything because it can get wrong blocks (in their favor of course) verified simply because it has more processing power.

For example verifying some self-created "everyone sent all his bitcoins to me"-Blocks, double-spending, scamming, all you can imagine suddenly comes possible if you have access to such an amount of huge Hashing power.

On the other hand, such an endaveour would have an initial cost of millions of dollars - why would they want to wreck their own system then?

It's just something you mustn't forget.

Given that the new "über-ASIC" would dominate everything else, it could get all the 2016 Blocks for itself, netting 1.5 million $ at 15$/BTC.

But I just realized that the difficulty would explode all over the roof, so actually it isn't that bad. Not likely that the owner of this ASIC would destroy his own business before he has paid off his hardware.