BitCoin mining difficulty forecast spreadsheet I made on Google Docs.

[LuckyXIII]

After reading about mining for a bit and pricing out some components on NewEgg I used a few of the calculators available on the web (such as http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/). But all the ones I found were locked in at a certain difficulty level. This is not very useful for future projections when the rate of difficulty is increasing at an exponential rate. So, being a bit of an Excel junkie I created this spread sheet to see if GPU mining still has a chance to be profitable.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmXn4BnLUgYsdEF0TUtWUWtUaUUzR1F2aUhEWW9lN2c#gid=0

The outlook is not good for GPU miners. If my calculations are even semi accurate, there is no money to be made with GPUs, unless you own the hardware already and get free electricity. It seems GPU mining won't even pay for the hardware if you buy it now.

Please take a look at this sheet and share your thoughts on how fast you think mining difficulty will continue to rise in the future.

[1714133974]

1714133974

[endriuska]

Sadly - it looks about right 

[LuckyXIII]

Yeah, the recent 28% difficulty  jump really makes the future of mining look bleak unless you have some serious hardware...

[bigdude]

welcome to the future

[endriuska]

I just packed my 18x6870 which i ordered 29 days ago and they are going back to where they came from

[taenaive]

I just packed my 18x6870 which i ordered 29 days ago and they are going back to where they came from

you will miss the heat it made.

[Gamah]

Why is it that all of these predictions assume a fixed price per BTC...?

How would your graph look if at 150,000,000 difficulty that BTC is trading at $400/coin?

[LuckyXIII]

Why is it that all of these predictions assume a fixed price per BTC...?

How would your graph look if at 150,000,000 difficulty that BTC is trading at $400/coin?

It's not fixed. You can change the BTC price to whatever you want. It's just defaulted to the current price.

[Mabsark]

The problem with most of these spreadsheets is for the later periods. For example, your spreadsheet assumes that the difficulty will increase by 265,669,181,621 on 13-Oct-2014. That means an increase in the network hash rate of 1.9017341e+18 h/s, that's 1,901,734.1 Th/s

I doubt that would be physically possibly even if every foundry on the planet was cranking out ASICs and there was enough labour and resources to assemble mining systems without any delay.

[Gamah]

Why is it that all of these predictions assume a fixed price per BTC...?

How would your graph look if at 150,000,000 difficulty that BTC is trading at $400/coin?

It's not fixed. You can change the BTC price to whatever you want. It's just defaulted to the current price.

Yes but your speculation on loss of profitability stems entirely from using that fixed price point.

[LuckyXIII]

The problem with most of these spreadsheets is for the later periods. For example, your spreadsheet assumes that the difficulty will increase by 265,669,181,621 on 13-Oct-2014. That means an increase in the network hash rate of 1.9017341e+18 h/s, that's 1,901,734.1 Th/s

I doubt that would be physically possibly even if every foundry on the planet was cranking out ASICs and there was enough labour and resources to assemble mining systems without any delay.

Any thing based on speculation will get more and more innacurate the farther out you speculate. I think it's pretty close for the near term, but there are a lot of factors we can't predict right now.

As far as the difficulty rate increasing exponentially, I don't know how long it can continue. Maybe the growth rate will become more linear soon, even drop once the profitability goes down. If I had a crystal ball I'd be a millionaire. I guess that's why some people will AISCs are selling Meghash contracts, to curb the risk of the unknown for a set profit now.

[LuckyXIII]

Why is it that all of these predictions assume a fixed price per BTC...?

How would your graph look if at 150,000,000 difficulty that BTC is trading at $400/coin?

It's not fixed. You can change the BTC price to whatever you want. It's just defaulted to the current price.

Yes but your speculation on loss of profitability stems entirely from using that fixed price point.

That fixed point is the price of BTC when you sell them at some date in the future, ideally when it is highest. If you are worried about the price dropping you could sell your BTC as soon as you mine them, or periodically as you choose.

I don't want to get into that sort of speculation with this sheet, that's why I used a set amount. You can play still around with different BTC to USD conversion rates and see how the price will affect your net income.

[bcpokey]

Why is it that all of these predictions assume a fixed price per BTC...?

How would your graph look if at 150,000,000 difficulty that BTC is trading at $400/coin?

It's not fixed. You can change the BTC price to whatever you want. It's just defaulted to the current price.

Yes but your speculation on loss of profitability stems entirely from using that fixed price point.

There is literally no way to even speculate on future pricing of BTC, with any kind of claim to accuracy. It could be $400, or $4000 or $400,000,000, or it could be $1. You can be bearish, or bullish, and you really can't back it up with anything beyond that.

You can certainly speculate on hashing power, based on current available data, pricing, orders-to-date, etc., within a reasonable set of bounds.

To create a spreadsheet predicting difficulty is entertainment, to predict price, madness.

[LuckyXIII]

Sorry, I thought it was set so anyone could edit and plug in values to try, but apparently it was not. Now it's open so anyone can edit, feel free to adjust the values on the right...

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmXn4BnLUgYsdEF0TUtWUWtUaUUzR1F2aUhEWW9lN2c#gid=0

[Slipage]

Great info although very generous with the calculations. There are many unknown variables but with the ASICs being flooded before end of year my calculations looking at various factors and pre order numbers it will be over 200 million before the end of the year.

[LuckyXIII]

Great info although very generous with the calculations. There are many unknown variables but with the ASICs being flooded before end of year my calculations looking at various factors and pre order numbers it will be over 200 million before the end of the year.

Which calcultations are you refering to? The sheet is open so people have been modifying all the input values. Or are you refering to some of the formulas that calculate the values on the left?

[rpg]

forecasting is not an exact science, far from it, but the way you did it is incorrect. A better way is to increase the difficulty based lets say on the average of the last 5 periods + 10% or  -10% depending on the direction. Your exponential increase eventually runs into requiring more and more grains of sand to the point that there's none available. The difficulty will run into a wall where GPU and ASIC farms will start closing. Many smart (cough cough) people is mining to be rich. Wrong move, they will at best break even and will be served divorce papers instead :-) Also count on BTC going down to previous levels. The current BTC price requires new money coming into the system at a pace of 100 million dollars ++++ year. That will not happen

[steelcutoatmeal]

The current BTC price requires new money coming into the system at a pace of 100 million dollars ++++ year. That will not happen

So why doesn't BTC just implode right now without this 100 million coming in every year?

[steelcutoatmeal]

3-4 million a day with only 1-2 going out?


Nice.

[Luciddd]

I think this is very useful, thank you.