I created this simple spreadsheet for my own use after wishing I could find a better more realistic way to project difficulty levels than the many fixed % growth calculators out there now. There would, of course, be a return to stabilized levels, but it was just a matter of finding where and possibly when that curve would take place. I’m not here to argue for when and what the difficulty will be in the coming months as everyone can agree we’re headed for some sharp inclines, but rather to provide a framework that others can use to adjust the curve according to their own outlook. The figures used in the chart are a bit more optimistic than what I used for my decisions regarding mining HW investments.
In this document, there are two spreadsheets; a difficulty projector and a hardware gross profit calculator. To use these,
please only edit the fields colored in green. (You'll need to download your own version to edit)Difficulty Projection sheet; Adjust the figures in the top row labeled, "Percent of Difficulty Change". Rather than adjusting these figures according to their impact on difficulty levels, focus on the impact to the "Avg. TH Added per Week" (Gold) column to reflect your opinions for how much cumulative hash power will reasonably / optimistically / pessimistically be dropped into the network on a weekly basis from ASIC vendors.
When I originally made this, I didn’t have an extensively thorough collection of information regarding quantities of ASIC pre-orders, but for this version I’m making public, I’ve included a table with some excellent data being pulled together in
DeathAndTaxes’ thread. I’d like to thank D&T and those who have contributed there in putting together this very valuable data. Using this information and some other basic understandings of profitability & efficiencies, I believe you can come to some fairly reasonable and accurate forecasts.
Cumulative Profit Calculator Swap your miner hardware hashing figures into the "Coin mined/day" table under the "Speed in GH" column. Determine the length of time in days that you wish to project out with that equipment and distribute that between the two given Time Ranges. Currently, I've got 390 days, or about 13 months, split between the two time ranges of 210 and 180 days. The % of time range at the top of the sheet can be adjusted to change the number of mining days at the corresponding difficulty levels. At the moment, it is setup to calculate about a month for each difficulty column. Finally, you can adjust the difficulty levels in the upper table and the Projected BTC value as you see fit. The grayed out portions allow you to consider losses with a delay in shipment or to compare HW returns if received at different times.
I believe everything is pretty self-explanatory, but if you have any questions or find any bugs, please let me know.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Ah2uk3JcIcJ_dGhHeG5fU3E3UXBnd2ljVDMzXzk2MUE&usp=sharing
