Here is a chart of the history of bicoin mining profitability.

[Hook^]

It combines difficulty and bitcoin pricing over time.

Since MtGox pricing data doesn't exist before Sept 2010, I had to fake it with some rough data from bitmarket.
The data from the exchanges isn't in a clean one row per day format, so the graph will be a little bit off, but it shows the general trend well.

Hopefully, Sipa will add a chart like this to his site in the near future with code that can clean up the data a bit and combine pricing data from mtgox and bitmarket.

https://i.imgur.com/TU0fm.jpg

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[anthony.selby]

Your seriously trying to say that you only make $.01 (so a penny) every day mining ?

[MrWizard]

Your seriously trying to say that you only make $.01 (so a penny) every day mining ?

y-axis clearly states Dollars per Day per MH/S

[Hook^]

Your seriously trying to say that you only make $.01 (so a penny) every day mining ?

750 MH/S on my computer.  So 750*.01 = $7.50/day.

[AngelusWebDesign]

Ugh!

There are some real idiots on this board, sad to say.

Some people can't even read and interpret a graph -- some people can barely read, especially anything with complexity or nuance!

Kids don't read enough these days. Too much screen time!

[1.21gigawatts]

yeah you pimpled face 17 year olds living out of your mom's basement who doesn't want to sell Angelus your video cards (at 50% off market price) you bought with your mom's credit card, learn how to read

[ribuck]

A GPU card hashes around 50 times as fast as a CPU. The switch from CPU mining to predominantly-GPU mining occurred during the second half of 2010. So bear in mind that the average miner had around 50 times as many megahashes/second at the end of 2010 than they did in mid-2010.

If you adjust for that, the chart would be fairly level.

[Hook^]

A GPU card hashes around 50 times as fast as a CPU. The switch from CPU mining to predominantly-GPU mining occurred during the second half of 2010. So bear in mind that the average miner had around 50 times as many megahashes/second at the end of 2010 than they did in mid-2010.

If you adjust for that, the chart would be fairly level.

The chart uses only difficulty and pricing data.  How powerful each miner's machine was doesn't change the chart.

I think what you are saying is that the cost of buying hardware in the begining was much higher in terms of $/MH/S performance because they were only CPUs.  So your ROI was closer to the same because it cost around $400/MH/S for CPU power rather than $1/MH/S for GPUs.  I can make another chart showing ROI with those considerations in the future.

[dentldir]

I think what you are saying is that the cost of buying hardware in the begining was much higher in terms of $/MH/S performance because they were only CPUs.  So your ROI was closer to the same because it cost around $400/MH/S for CPU power rather than $1/MH/S for GPUs.  I can make another chart showing ROI with those considerations in the future.

Please do.  I'm really enjoying all these views into Bitcoin data.

[Syke]

It would be more readable if the Y axis went down to $0, and you switched to GH/s instead of MH/s.

[Hook^]

It would be more readable if the Y axis went down to $0, and you switched to GH/s instead of MH/s.

I can change to GH/S, but you can't put 0 on a logarithmic chart.

[ZombieDeity]

It would be more readable if the Y axis went down to $0, and you switched to GH/s instead of MH/s.

I can change to GH/S, but you can't put 0 on a logarithmic chart.

Then maybe put $0.001 or $0.0001.... something it's not actually running into?

[triforcelink]

This seems appropriate http://tvori.info/bitcoin/charts/

[borgfish]

Hello,

nice chart. There should ne a correlation to how much it has cost in USD to have that much mh/s.
In the days before the gpu miners this surely would have been quite expensive.

[ZombieDeity]

This seems appropriate http://tvori.info/bitcoin/charts/

That's interesting.  I've been to that chart many times, but never really looked at the Namecoin numbers.  Apparently, after the next difficulty update, Namecoin mining will be significantly more profitable than Bitcoin.  Can that be true?  Where do you even exchange Namecoins?

[Salain]

Hello,

nice chart. There should ne a correlation to how much it has cost in USD to have that much mh/s.
In the days before the gpu miners this surely would have been quite expensive.

This is the right idea.  Any chart like this has to be standardized to one particular setup - and therefore a particular hardware depreciation rate and MH/Watt.  Also, as mentioned above, there have been "epochs" where the available processing tech has changed, so back-dating across multiple epochs is tricky.  Within epochs, there is still movement too, just not as jumpy.