In any case for the chapter you should consider doing a review of bitcoin mining profitability in the past since it greatly influenced the current state of the bitcoin economy - especially since it widely distributed coins to those that were willing to turn their cpu and then later gpu cycles to it. You could discuss the current state where it requires dedicated ASIC (application-specific integrated circuits) to have profitability and the hardware that is profitable generally requires a pre-order gamble to acquire in a timely manner.
Yes that's in. I explained the hardware evolution from cpu's to asic's and made 2 calculations with an actual asic-device. In the first calculation the device is delivered in time and the miner makes a huge profit, in the second one the device is delivered with 2 months delay and the miner will never reach break even. That's how I show how critical the delivery time is. (my underlying assumptions are: difficulty rises every 11 days about 28% - that's the average from the last half year) (unfortunately I'll have to calculate this new because I calculated with a device from xtrememiners, which is certainly scam.. :-( )
Then I suggest you turn an eye towards the future. The total computational power of the network has grown exponentially - fueled in my opinion somewhat by increased bitcoin value and somewhat by technology that is more efficient - can this continue for the long term? While moore's law has stunned some by holding true with exponential growth in computing power over more than 40 years - the limited pool of resources for bitcoin (the remaining coins to be minted + transaction fees) will likely mean mining power growth will likely become linear and logarithmic after a time. But you certainly shouldn't try to predict that timeframe too accurately - the error bars are probably measured in tens of months. Not to mention the exit of the home miner - soon typical household electric circuits will be sufficient to host the required juice to keep relevant miners powered.
Yeah I'm thinking about something like that too, but actually I don't know how to do this. I'd have to make a lot of uncertain assumptions and therefore it could happen that it becomes not scientific enough for scientific paper.
Lots of great avenues for topics, I hope you've carved out a good one. I also encourage you to use analogies to relate the at times tediously technical details of bitcoin operation. Things like What is difficulty? What is one bitcoin? Why is it secure? Analogy is a technique often leaned upon by the great physicists to translate the technical into the everyday - think
I'm writing for an audience with economical background and it was really not easy to explain the technical stuff in an easy to understand manner. If someone with technical background and or knowledge about bitcoin read this he will for sure shake his head :-D
But that was not the first one also see the BioInfoBank 100TH Mining Farm Project
https://picostocks.com/businessplan/19.pdf is from 2013.
If you have any sense you will write your dissertation about whether the BioInfoBank 100TH mining project reached it's investment goals as it's set out in a clearly defined business plan that you can critique it with hindsight.
This sounds very interesting, I'll work through that, thanks!
if you take a look at cex.io, you will find people buying 1 GH/s mining contract for 0.043+ btc.
most irrational.
Ironically, cex.io has a built-in calculator showing that people will never get their investment back (not even close), but it seems no one cares about it.
Yeah, cex.io is one reason why I think many or most miners don't act rational. If they would the price would go down, but it don't. Another reason are those usb-mining-sticks (usb-miner) which were sold like crazy and the next reason is the insane prices people are paying on Ebay for mining hardware.
Interestingly it is really considerable to buy some GH on cex.io, because if the prices keep on not going down you can sell them after a period and had the mining for free.
Thanks guys for all you replies yet :-)
