Realistic Bitcoin Mining Calculator

[MiningBuddy]

New miners and veterans alike, I present to you the most realistic bitcoin profitability calculator I have seen on the web.
This calculator take into account difficulty increases and should show you a more accurate overview of bitcoin mining and potential profits.

http://striketeam.ath.cx/btccalc/btccalc.php
If you find it useful, donate to the creators address on the website!

[Yeti]

Nice! That should be the default, so new miners don't get excited when they see "$200/month" on alloscomp and don't realize that within a month there might be 3-5 diff changes.

However, fixing the difficutly change time at 10 days is kind of moot, if you assume a steady growth rate you can also determine the change intervals from that. Diff change is every 2016 blocks, if you assume 20% increase in difficulty that must mean 20% more hashrate so instead of 6 blocks / hour there will be 7.2 blocks / hour, thus 11.6 days between diff changes.

[EskimoBob]

This is a excellent calculator. Yeti makes a valid point. Good job MiningBuddy

[SgtSpike]

Sorry, mine's still better.  Difficulty adjusts more quickly or slowly according to the percentage change entered into the spreadsheet.

I like the graph though, nice touch.  Oh, and I guess yours isn't in Excel, which is a huge plus.

Overall though, I've just given up on mining calculators.  Mining will always be profitable for some people (you'll never have instances of making $0.60/month, as your and my calculators would indicate), so they're just kind of pointless.  Modern efficient hardware will pay for itself eventually, unless Bitcoin takes a huge dump (which I don't think any of us are counting on).

[lpcustom]

I hate it. It is too depressing. J/K, great work!

[Yeti]

It's not depressing anymore, when you enter a growth factor of 0.9.

[Desolator]

Does anyone have any idea what a realistic growth rate would be?  I assume "growth" means basically GH/s of the entire network, right?  Or is it some other obscure mathematical thing that I forgot reading about? Cuz at the rate in the screenshot, everyone everywhere is going to be in huge trouble in about 2 months and gone in 2012.  At even 1.2 it would hover into unprofitable by next month for the absolute most efficient card there is in watts vs price vs speed.  Enough people at that point would stop mining that it would hover slightly above or below profitable depending on how many people quit.  Then in 2012, it's not some single digit percent drop, it's a flat 50% cut out of nowhere?  That's going to kill the entire system.  Nobody can afford a drop like that even if 90% of the miners (based on # right now) stop.

Oh and you call it a more realistic calculator of money and it doesn't take into account wattage or electricity prices?  Yeeeeeeeah.

[Oldminer]

 

[mushy99999]

New miners and veterans alike, I present to you the most realistic bitcoin profitability calculator I have seen on the web.
This calculator take into account difficulty increases and should show you a more accurate overview of bitcoin mining and potential profits.

http://striketeam.ath.cx/btccalc/btccalc.php
If you find it useful, donate to the creators address on the website!

https://i.imgur.com/0gfyC.jpg

Nice, however incorrect, as it doesn't factor in price rises of coins. If you plot price rises against difficulty you will see there is a price rise in line with difficulty rises, so even if you can only mine a lower amount of BTC, then the price you get for them is higher also.

Nice graph, wrong conclusion.

[EskimoBob]

If you plot price rises against difficulty you will see there is a price rise in line with difficulty rises, so even if you can only mine a lower amount of BTC, then the price you get for them is higher also.

Are you sure about that?
Maybe before Mai 2011 but now its more than questionable. Lets look at June to July difficulty and BTC price.
We started out somewhere around 0.6 mill and now we are at 1,69 mil - this is more than 280% rise in difficulty.
BTC was trading around 10 in the beginning of June and now we are at 13-14 USD. I see 30% rise (not bad at all). Forget the jump to 30, this had nothing to do with difficulty.
If you look at the July data, picture is quite the opposite to your prediction. Difficulty jumped from 1.2 mil to 1,69 an this is almost 40% jump. At the same time, BTC has fallen from 17 to 13.5.  Do be honest, this a bit strange.

BTC needs more businesses to accept the coin and not more miners to flood the market. In long term, I am bullish and I believe that more businesses will starting to accept the coin. This need some serious PR work and selling.
 




 
   
 
 

[Desolator]

lol well...they have a couple months to implement an entirely new payment system then cuz sometime in 2012 the coins per block is gonna get cut in half and most of the miners are gonna quit.  I don't see that happening that quickly.  I don't see it happening at all actually since the currency right now is setting itself up for a horrific failure just looking at the math.

[mushy99999]

If you plot price rises against difficulty you will see there is a price rise in line with difficulty rises, so even if you can only mine a lower amount of BTC, then the price you get for them is higher also.

Are you sure about that?
Maybe before Mai 2011 but now its more than questionable. Lets look at June to July difficulty and BTC price.
We started out somewhere around 0.6 mill and now we are at 1,69 mil - this is more than 280% rise in difficulty.
BTC was trading around 10 in the beginning of June and now we are at 13-14 USD. I see 30% rise (not bad at all). Forget the jump to 30, this had nothing to do with difficulty.
If you look at the July data, picture is quite the opposite to your prediction. Difficulty jumped from 1.2 mil to 1,69 an this is almost 40% jump. At the same time, BTC has fallen from 17 to 13.5.  Do be honest, this a bit strange.

BTC needs more businesses to accept the coin and not more miners to flood the market. In long term, I am bullish and I believe that more businesses will starting to accept the coin. This need some serious PR work and selling.
 
Well yes, except that there has been a few factors which have stagnated the price such as the MTGOX issue and the fact that trading fees have been waived over that period etc,. etc,... I really don't think you can take the latest month or two as valid examples. These have been strange months. I believe the price will re-adjust soon. I also think that due to namecoins being more profitable in the short term, this will reduce the difficulty of Bitcoins temporarily also (even if it's only the once). Over time we will see what happens but to simply put in a calculator where the price remains fixed for all eternity is not an accurate reflection in my opinion. I am holding quite a lot of Bitcoins (not selling) as I feel that they will rise in price soon. So although my profit may be (x) if I sell now, it will not be (x) later down the line, so you can argue that mining may be more profitable than the current price indicates if the value rises at some point. If the price rises, I get benefit for all previously mined coins as I'm holding on. The reverse is also true.



 
   
 
 

[Dargo]

It would be nice to factor in price. I'd like to have a calculator where you could input current price and then a fraction that represents a ratio of price increase/difficulty increase or something like that. It would still be a pretty artificial calculation though. I think the most realistic profit calculator would be one where you input the numbers and the return says "I have no freakin clue." Lol, just a joke, it's not quite that bad. But I still haven't seen a profit calculator that I can take very seriously. There are some unpredictable and constantly changing variables, and this makes future profit calculations speculative at best.

[Desolator]

lol I like where you're going with it.  I have another similar idea.  Make a calculator where the answer is always "10% above profitable break even point of the most efficient cards, ignoring the initial cost of the hardware, but counting only the median price of electricity" because that's where it will be in a few months.  That's because new miners will keep starting mining with no stopping them until it's no longer profitable.  Then most new, some longtime, and other random miners will stop mining.  People have absolutely no reason to mine if they're actually losing money on it due to the sheer volume of other GPUs working on it.

Transaction commissions are not going to be a factor until after the 2012 split and after there's 100x more volume at the absolute earliest.

That's why I'm reconsidering purchasing further hardware to go above a single 5830 rig.  The thing is, a triple card rig will pay for itself about 25% faster so I dunno.  There are 0 for sale on planet earth anyway lol.

[mushy99999]

There are 0 for sale on planet earth anyway lol.

I can get 5830's no problem at all here in the UK. And cheap too.

[Yeti]

Any "realistic" calculator needs to present multiple scenarios.
E.g. assume a stagnant price and a difficulty curve that starts at 10% rise and grows slower with each difficulty change.
Versus assuming a linear price increase of 10% and a difficulty that rises linear at 10%...
etc.

All those arguments about "oh, it's an endless sequence, therefore your maximum mining profit - even at infinity - can only be x BTC" are proven wrong the minute the difficulty does not climb endlessly by 30%, as witnessed right now.

I have done this in Excel for various scenarios, so I know where my exit points in terms of difficulty and price are (e.g. $10 and 1,800,000 or $20 and 2,300,000 - I just made those up). I watch all the variables closely and determine weekly in what direction it's going, adapting scenarios along the way. That's the only way to predict anything realistically.

[Snapman]

This calculator is really depressing.

[SHlFT]

This calculator is really depressing.

Very Depressing.

And it used GHash/s instead of MHash/s

Not a lot of people have over a GigHash/s

[Yeti]

This calculator is really depressing.

Very Depressing.

And it used GHash/s instead of MHash/s

Not a lot of people have over a GigHash/s

I don't think so. If you take the current difficulty increase estimate of roughly 3-5% you're still pretty well off in 12 months time. I have to agree with you though, that using Gigahashes as the unit of choice suggests that it's not even worth to mine with less than 1 GH/s. Also the scale is a lot bigger for smaller increases, making the curve pretty low which discourages more at first glance.

Note: At this point, the calculator is not considering the fact that at some point in 2012, the amount of coins per block is halved.

Where can a newbie get more information about this?

E.g. here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Blocks
Quote: "The number of Bitcoins generated per block starts at 50 and is halved every 210,000 blocks (about four years)."

[Yeti]

You cannot realistically determine any future development of the difficulty as it's highly correlated to the price (higher prices make it more feasible to mine so more people will join) and to the overall acceptance of Bitcoin.

Afair, 1.45 was the latest difficulty change right around the time this calculator came out. Part of the reason for this was most likely that you can more or less ignore 5% change in difficulty as it will affect you only slightly in the short term. But 50% difficulty increase shocked some people and invalidated profitability calculations done based on old difficulties and an estimated low to moderate increase.

Since only one difficulty change so far has been negative, I think it's reasonable to assume an overall modest climb. As I said, do more than one scenario, 1%, 5%, 10%, 20% constant rise in difficulty (which would result in 1.01, 1.05, 1.1, 1.2 as the input) and see where that would take you, then watch reality follow one or the other curve.