How Many TH will you need to mine 1 BTC per month in January 2015?

[cdog]

Simple poll, how many TH will a miner need to strut out a year from now to mine one BTC in the month of January 2015?

For those thinking about getting into mining now, or selling some coins when BTC goes back over $1k, you might want to pay careful attention here.

Personally, I think its a great time to buy some coins. 2014 is going to be epic!

[AvalonMiner]

Honestly I think it will be a large amount maybe 5TH. The difficulty will be in the multi-billions by then but the price will match

[semzor]

about 15-25 TH if hash speed grows like this
maybe btc would worth 5k by then

[cdog]

For those of you who voted 25TH and below, whats your reasoning behind the difficulty plateauing in 2014?

[baddw]

For those of you who voted 25TH and below, whats your reasoning behind the difficulty plateauing in 2014?

I don't see difficulty plateauing per se, but I see the rate of increase dropping dramatically.  It is currently in exponential mode due to the large-scale rollout of ASICs which are hugely faster than the previous generation mining tech.  2nd gen ASICs (28/20nm) see good improvements over previous gen hardware, but not comparable to 1st gen ASIC over GPU mining, or GPU mining over CPU mining.  We are now getting to where the state-of-the-art is limited by Moore's Law.

However, now that ASICs (1st gen) are "the new normal"/baseline, and there is no known, comparable disruptive technology in the near future, we are limited to mundane things like:

1) Amount of chips produced
2) Amount of power available at hosting facilities
3) Amount of money investors are willing to spend on new mining tech

For these reasons, I see the difficulty continuing to increase, but once the 2nd gen ASICs hit the market fully (6-9 months?) the difficulty increases will start to become linear instead of exponential.

[mcleo]

Pretty crazy predictions here... makes me re-think my investment.  Put about 1/3 of my income into mining gear in the past 5 months... I have got no fiat back, of course if i cashed out my btc I would be good.  Sad though because this gear is so nice, hard to believe how fast it will be obsolete.

[Korbman]

For those of you who voted 25TH and below, whats your reasoning behind the difficulty plateauing in 2014?

Some quick 'napkin' math says 25TH/s for BTC1 would require the difficulty to be, what, around 350B or so (network hashing speed at ~3500PH/s).
That's essentially the equivalent of selling 1.75 million Cointerra TerraMiner IVs, worth ~$10 billion.

Impossible? Definitely not, it could certainly happen. But over 12 months? Probably not. Bitcoin has a lot of growing to do before it reach that point.

[Clayce]

One meeeeeeeeellllliiiiooonnnn TH......

[mgio]

This is actually really simple.

First, let's assume BTC is $1000/btc at that time. It reality it could be way higher or way lower, but I think that's a reasonable guess for now.
 
Assume the most efficient miner available is 0.5w/GH/s and average electricity rate is $0.15/kwh.

That means spending $1000/month in electricity will get you 9,250 GH/s of hashing power.

For 9,250 GH/s of hashing power to make you 1 btc/month, difficulty would have to be at about 140 billion.

It reality miners need to make money to cover the cost of their hardware, so I doubt difficulty will go much higher than 100 billion if btc is at $1000, but around 100 billion is a good guess.

EDIT: so the answer is really less than 9250 GH/s.

It CAN'T be much more than this because the electricity cost to run the miners would be more than the miners would make assuming BTC is still around $1000/btc.

We aren't going to see miners more efficient than 0.5 w/GH/s either and even that is pushing it. That part you can be sure of.

[mgio]

For those of you who voted 25TH and below, whats your reasoning behind the difficulty plateauing in 2014?

Difficulty can not get anywhere near that high unless one of a two things happen:

1) The price of bitcoin goes up several times to $3,000 or more.
2) Super efficient miners appear. We are already at 20nm (coming soon from KNC) and so I doubt we'll see anything better than 0.5w/GH/s in 2014.
3) Electricity somehow becomes super cheap worldwide.

Otherwise, if 25TH/s was required with current BTC price and miner efficiency you would spend more money on electricity than you'd get back in BTC. Yes, there are people out there who have "free" electricity but there is nowhere near enough to support a mining network a couple of orders of magnitude larger than there is now.

[BuildTheFuture]

ASICMiner's next gen chip design (supposedly taping out any day now) has been said to target 0.20 W/GH/s. That may be in some kind of "slow" mode that people may not actually use at first, but at any rate such hardware could possibly become available a few months from now.

[-ck]

Eleventy billion

[Zeal0t]

As fun as it is to predict this, I don't see how anyone could possibly do so accurately. 

[alpher]

Woohoo: http://thegenesisblock.com/mining/a/d4d6067898

150 GH.

[Korbman]

Woohoo: http://thegenesisblock.com/mining/a/d4d6067898

150 GH.

You had it set for 150TH/s, not GH. And it's also assuming a consistent growth of 78%, which is incredibly unlikely.

[zimmah]

I think somewhere between 40 and 100 TH

[daynnite]

5TH max i think

[sharedminers]

I think Difficulty will be around 15B by then, which means that you'll need a 5 TH/s miner to make 1 btc per month.

[_Miracle]

Eleventy billion

One meeeeeeeeellllliiiiooonnnn TH......

Both of those made me laugh even though it really feels like that today

[nezarkadhem]

I think Difficulty will be around 15B by then, which means that you'll need a 5 TH/s miner to make 1 btc per month.

You guys are dreaming. Look at the warehouses of rigs and ASICs currently under construction. Anyone with under 50THs will be pushed out the game.