I was curious about how the entire BTC hash/s will be affected by all the ASICs coming online and what kind of difficulty could be expected in the future. According to the bitcoin wiki (
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty), the network hash rate is calculated with the following equation:
Network hash/s = Difficulty * 2**32 /600
Rounding to the nearest Thash/s, the current difficulty level shows 112 Thash/s in the entire BTC network.
The next difficulty increase is estimated to be around 19.5 million which means that the BTC network will have 140Thash/s (an increase of 28Thash/s in 2 weeks!!)
There's no way to know for sure how many ASICs will ship in the coming months so I took a wild guess as to how big the ASIC market is. Let's say every single registered bitcointalk member gets a 10Ghash/s miner for themselves. There are just over 126000 members so that would add 1260 Thash/s to the network. An additional 1260 Thash/s would push the difficulty up to 192 million.
I went to a bitcoin profit calculator (
http://www.bitcoinx.com/profit/) and plugged in some numbers. Lets say I bought 2 BFL 5GH/s miners for a total of $550 (not saying I'd buy from these guys, it was just an easy starting point). To make it simple I made the conversion rate 100 USD/BTC, "free electricity" and kept the default profitability decline (0.61). The break even is 248 days. That's less than a year to recoup a modest investment without considering the current difficulty rate is 10 times less than my estimation.
Could there be enough room in the market for everybody? I understand that every assumption above is a wild guess, but it seems like there could still be profit in the future by mining.
What do you guys think?
Also, let me know if my calculations are out of whack or if I haven't communicated the information in an understandable manner
