Network total 15.992 Thash/s (up to 16.7 now)

[jjiimm_64]

Has anyone else been watching the network hashrate?  This was at about 12 Thash/s yesterday and the projected difficulty has been going down for the last few days.

I haven't done the math, but that is a shitload of gpu's that just came on the network.  Maybe the 10 pricepoint is where people stopped/started mining?

edit:  now it is  Network total   16.754 Thash/s     

[1715049767]

1715049767

[1715049767]

1715049767

[bcpokey]

Probably just the variance coming in to play. Down to 11THash up to 16THash down to 12THash.




There are tons of spikes all the time, they're very rarely actually indicative of lots of new hash power being dropped on the network.

[AngelusWebDesign]

It may be luck. In that case, we've had nothing but bad luck for the past 7 days. The last time we had 7.XX blocks per hour (per BitcoinCharts.com) was on 8/2.
For the last several days, it was 4.XX or 5.XX blocks per hour, all day long.

Nevertheless, it doesn't look like anyone's left the party.

I think any plans as to "how will you celebrate the difficulty decrease" (see the thread by that name on this very forum) are premature at best.

There's a good Aesop's fable whose moral is:
"Don't count your chickens before they're hatched."

What's funny is that even when it looked like there was going to be one, it was only going to be somewhere in the ballpark of 1 or 2%.

We'll probably end up with a 3-5% increase this time around.

[abtain]

I have noticed even as the estimated difficulty was going down the overall network hash rate went up at night time. Probably because cards are running cooler and faster.

The difficulty will follow the price. Its surprising to me how quickly the network responds to price. Must have been some miners that shut systems down when they were unprofitable at $6.

[Oldminer]

Yea blocks per hours now @ 8.42, up from 5 or so yesterday...so who hooked up to the power grid?

[bcpokey]

I want to be annoyed by this continually repeating cycle of people seeing a spike in calculated hash rate and crying "FPGA! ASIC! SUPERCOMPUTER!" but this spike is actually surprisingly unusual. I'm going to sleep on it though before I wet my bed in terror. We'll see where the hash rate lands in the morning. I'm still guessing that it will fall back to the 13thash territory, but hey, go ahead and surprise me.

[Cluster2k]

Chances are that whoever invested into ASIC's would not be dumping it all on the market right away but wait a year or two.

Would they want to wait and risk bitcoins becoming worthless before recovering the high cost of their investment?  It seems to me the ASIC farm owner would want to sell into the market on a gradual basis to pay for electricity and hardware costs, while keeping some bitcoins for a later date.  That seems to be the lowest risk strategy rather than going for maximum risk.

In the past week we've seen bitcoins gyrate wildly in value.  Up to 30% per day.  Would anyone want to invest several hundred thousand dollars in serious ASIC capability into that?

[abtain]

Why not buy bitcoins instead of putting millions into ASIC?

[Cluster2k]

ASIC investors have a simple choice. Either wait with selling a year or two and have a decent chance to get huge reward or sell now into shallow market and have 100% chance of a huge loss.

The main attraction of ASICs is greatly reduced electricity consumption compared to powering a whole PC to run a few inefficient graphics cards.  If GPU mining is quite profitable at today's $10 BTC/USD exchange rate, then someone using ASICs and paying a lot less for power per BTC would be making even more money per bitcoin.  I don't get where the 100% chance of a huge loss comes in when mining would be very profitable right now.

$13M was fed through MtGox in the last 30 days.  Selling a few hundred thousand dollars of extra bitcoins in that period is unlikely to disrupt the market.

Mining heavily now and waiting a year or two to start selling is very risky, as there are a multitude of well established reasons why bitcoin may fail to flourish (published elsewhere, I won't repeat them here).  The choice is to cover your costs now and make a smaller profit later, or risk losing everything for a larger profit later on.  Pretty easy decision for the rational investor.

[memvola]

Mining heavily now and waiting a year or two to start selling is very risky, as there are a multitude of well established reasons why bitcoin may fail to flourish (published elsewhere, I won't repeat them here).  The choice is to cover your costs now and make a smaller profit later, or risk losing everything for a larger profit later on.  Pretty easy decision for the rational investor.

With that logic, building an ASIC farm would not be a rational investment, would it?

[Grinder]

Try to buy 100 mil$ worth of bitcoins, and you will know the answer to this one.

If you buy bitcoins you push the price and if you buy mining equipment you push the difficulty. Either way you get diminishing returns.

[mike678]

It looks like people turned their miners back on. No matter what the difficulty changes to I'm pretty sure we can all agree it will be a very insignificant change. On the bright side we can look forward to around 20 more days of the same difficulty.

[bcpokey]

It looks like people turned their miners back on. No matter what the difficulty changes to I'm pretty sure we can all agree it will be a very insignificant change. On the bright side we can look forward to around 20 more days of the same difficulty.

No, as I explained above, this was only a variance blip.  Seems another picture is in order.



Blip goes up, blip goes down. /thread.

Nothing new in this thread, no billion new gpus came online, no asic farms. ASIC farms are more or less unrealistic still because no one has the confidence in bitcoin to make such an investment. $100 million dollars in GPUs would take over the bitcoin network with ease ("electrical costs" are marginal). The only way asics make any sense is long long long term, and does anyone have that kind of faith right now?

/thread

[jjiimm_64]

It looks like people turned their miners back on. No matter what the difficulty changes to I'm pretty sure we can all agree it will be a very insignificant change. On the bright side we can look forward to around 20 more days of the same difficulty.

this was my 'best case scenario'   I came to the party a little later (mid jun).  I have been slowly building miners since.  (I coulda swore that 12-3 wire was going to be enough) .

my best case scenario is that the price stays around 10 for the next few months whilst I accumulate btcs.  I have not sold 1 btc yet

[jjiimm_64]

It looks like people turned their miners back on. No matter what the difficulty changes to I'm pretty sure we can all agree it will be a very insignificant change. On the bright side we can look forward to around 20 more days of the same difficulty.

No, as I explained above, this was only a variance blip.  Seems another picture is in order.



Blip goes up, blip goes down. /thread.

Nothing new in this thread, no billion new gpus came online, no asic farms. ASIC farms are more or less unrealistic still because no one has the confidence in bitcoin to make such an investment. $100 million dollars in GPUs would take over the bitcoin network with ease ("electrical costs" are marginal). The only way asics make any sense is long long long term, and does anyone have that kind of faith right now?

/thread

Thank you for the charts.  this eases my mind somewhat. 

[mike678]

It looks like people turned their miners back on. No matter what the difficulty changes to I'm pretty sure we can all agree it will be a very insignificant change. On the bright side we can look forward to around 20 more days of the same difficulty.

No, as I explained above, this was only a variance blip.  Seems another picture is in order.

I'm not 100% sure why your quoting me. Unless you think there was 6 days of bad luck people did shut off there equipment. It looks like its going back to what the difficulty is currently though hence me saying people turned miners back on.

Every other comment I made is true though. We can expect insignificant changes to the next difficulty and that means around 20 days with no real change in difficulty.

[fcmatt]

asics... the boogie man of gpu miners. never seen but greatly feared. it gets old after a while.

[Grinder]

BTC Guild has had +32% luck for the last 24 hours, but unknown miners solved 5 blocks in the period it spiked as well: http://pident.artefact2.com/more

That is unusually many, so it seems likely that someone with a lot of mining power did some solo mining for a few hours.

[bcpokey]

It looks like people turned their miners back on. No matter what the difficulty changes to I'm pretty sure we can all agree it will be a very insignificant change. On the bright side we can look forward to around 20 more days of the same difficulty.

No, as I explained above, this was only a variance blip.  Seems another picture is in order.

I'm not 100% sure why your quoting me. Unless you think there was 6 days of bad luck people did shut off there equipment. It looks like its going back to what the difficulty is currently though hence me saying people turned miners back on.

Every other comment I made is true though. We can expect insignificant changes to the next difficulty and that means around 20 days with no real change in difficulty.

There is no evidence of people turning on their rigs in the past 24 hours. You see a huge spike upwards, then you see a tremendous fall back downwards. What you can extrapolate from that is... not much, other than that variance can be quite crazy. Let it smooth out over the next day or so to get a better picture of where things are at now. I agree there will be a minor shift in difficulty, though I don't consider a drop in difficulty insignificant, from a resource gatherer perspective, if we indeed see one.

BTC Guild has had +32% luck for the last 24 hours, but unknown miners solved 5 blocks in the period it spiked as well: http://pident.artefact2.com/more

That is unusually many, so it seems likely that someone with a lot of mining power did some solo mining for a few hours.

Not sure how you arrive at that conclusion. What is the motivation for someone with "a lot of mining power" to turn it on for a few hours, solve a few blocks and then turn it off? For a sense of what that suggests, 4TH/s is the equivalent of about 10,000 radeon 5870s, or 5,000 6990s. Who turns that on for a few hours?

It's actually much more likely that a buncha people got really lucky for a bit. BTCGuild was at -32% luck and then jumped to +32%, deepbit was solving blocks as fast as 5minutes at a time, slush probably did well too. Some unknowns found blocks. It's just variance.