BTC Price drop, huge cut in Pool Hash Rate

[JBDive]

I don't know about you guys but I find it very telling and interesting to see the huge cut in overall pool hash rates when we get these price drops. Looking at Bitcoins.lc they have dropped almost by half their normal hash rate, usually in the 500 Ghash/s range, this morning it's 279.93 Ghash/s. I don't follow Deep as I only use them as a backup but there's been a drop there as well. For the most part I don't think the single or small miners look at these price moves and go turn off their miner however a miner with 10 cards or more who is slowly selling into the market to cover cost would. If true just goes to show how much of the hashing power is from some fairly large rigs.

[Reckman]

I feel like it will take a month of unprofitability for miners to quit.

[Dargo]

The overall hash rate and difficulty hasn't really dropped that much over the last few weeks compared percentage-wise to the drop in bitcoin price. In spite of all the talk on this board about shutting down rigs, it would appear that so far most miners aren't actually doing this. Or, for those who are shutting off rigs, this is offset to some extent by new/expanding miners coming online. I'd love to see the difficulty drop to half of what it is now, but it looks like that won't happen anytime soon, if ever.

[johnj]

Looking at Bitcoins.lc they have dropped almost by half their normal hash rate, usually in the 500 Ghash/s range, this morning it's 279.93 Ghash/s.

Is the round after 43%...? 

[EskimoBob]

at <5 USD most of the EU and some parts of US are out. You believe it's going up? Buy the damn things It's sure is stupid to mine at  higher cost than you can buy from the market (if you believe the price will go up)

[AngelusWebDesign]

It's $4.70 right now. Couldn't believe my eyes this morning!

[JBDive]

Looking at Bitcoins.lc they have dropped almost by half their normal hash rate, usually in the 500 Ghash/s range, this morning it's 279.93 Ghash/s.

Is the round after 43%...? 

Your suggesting Pool hopping and not rigs shutting down? Could be, I myself moved elsewhere after the round that took 24 hours.

[MrWizard]

It is stupid to extrapolate about the whole bitcoin hashrate from one pool. There are a few sites that will give you current total hash rate.  Use them and know your facts.

[AngelusWebDesign]

With $4.70 Bitcoins, there are certainly a *lot* of people losing money on every Bitcoin produced at the moment.
The only questions are how many, where, what kind of miners, etc.

Holding them for later is not guaranteed to bring more income, as the future price might be $1 for all we know. We have to go by what the price is right now, and where the price is trending.
There's no indication it's going to go up again, though it might.

I tell you what though... I've read several people claiming they're going to mine BTC even at a loss. I think that's stupid. To them I say: You go ahead and produce worthless BTC with your money, but I'll take my money and do something more useful and enjoyable with it, thanks. If the price drops a bit further, going below my cost, I'm shutting down.

I'm not going to be brought to reality kicking and screaming -- I'll go quietly. I don't know about you guys, but reality is my friend. He should be your friend too. He kicks your butt when you try to ignore him, so it's better to embrace his friendship.

[gw4tt]

I turned mine off.

[JBDive]

With $4.70 Bitcoins, there are certainly a *lot* of people losing money on every Bitcoin produced at the moment.
The only questions are how many, where, what kind of miners, etc.

Holding them for later is not guaranteed to bring more income, as the future price might be $1 for all we know. We have to go by what the price is right now, and where the price is trending.
There's no indication it's going to go up again, though it might.

I tell you what though... I've read several people claiming they're going to mine BTC even at a loss. I think that's stupid. To them I say: You go ahead and produce worthless BTC with your money, but I'll take my money and do something more useful and enjoyable with it, thanks. If the price drops a bit further, going below my cost, I'm shutting down.

I'm not going to be brought to reality kicking and screaming -- I'll go quietly. I don't know about you guys, but reality is my friend. He should be your friend too. He kicks your butt when you try to ignore him, so it's better to embrace his friendship.

So the early adopters and those with huge rigs in general look at current prices and cost per BTC vs. using some dollar cost averaging? By that I mean if you mined thousands of .25 BTC when the difficulty was far lower your cost per BTC would be higher, lower or the same since you generated far more BTC per GPU cycle? I would think a 1G/H miner that was mining at say difficulty 55590 was generating almost 20 BTC per day compared to what half a BTC today so had they held those initial coins they are way above break even on a cost basis. Now had if they have not held and slowly sold into bull markets then it's another story.

Doesn't the fact we are looking at a third decrease in difficulty prove miners are shutting down and in fairly large numbers? Do we not also see some pretty large players just using market trades as a revenue stream signal it's likely those guys have stopped mining and are just playing with house money?

[Dargo]

at <5 USD most of the EU and some parts of US are out. You believe it's going up? Buy the damn things It's sure is stupid to mine at  higher cost than you can buy from the market (if you believe the price will go up)

It will be interesting to see how much of a drop in overall hash rate we get after today's carnage.

[AngelusWebDesign]

Even if difficulty dropped by half -- not gonna happen, by the way -- you'd still be making the equivalent of 9.5 BTC per day at the current difficulty.

Still not much!

But the reality is that we're going to have a 2% or 3% drop in difficulty, in exchange for the price dropping from $11.50 to $4.80.  Would you call that a wash?

Between
the Zero Electricity Cost crowd
the Folding @ Home crowd (whose idea of "fun" is to spend their money on crunching numbers for science)
the "I've already set up my rigs, even if I make 25 cents a day it's worth it" crowd,
and
the "Bitcoin will be $100 each by this time next year...I'll keep mining for now, counting on that future increase" crowd

...we're not going to see much of a difficulty decrease.

So if a large difficulty decrease is what you're counting on, you might as well give up that idea now.

[wndrbr3d]

Aren't the calculated hash rates just an estimated based on block discovery rate? I mean... we could ALSO just be in an unlucky streak. I find it highly unlikely that miners pay that close of attention to BTC/$ prices and decide their actions on an hour by hour basis.

[bcpokey]

Aren't the calculated hash rates just an estimated based on block discovery rate? I mean... we could ALSO just be in an unlucky streak. I find it highly unlikely that miners pay that close of attention to BTC/$ prices and decide their actions on an hour by hour basis.

Hash rates haven't dropped much at all yet. It's not that hard to look, I've posted this site a jillion times.



That said, as a miner I do decide my actions on an hour by hour basis, and I shut my miners down days ago. Made me sad, but it had to be done.

[AngelusWebDesign]

Who knows, many of us might be right behind you. (At least those of us who are rational *grin*)

Hopefully if BTC totally crashes/flops/ends we'll have another thing like it arise (soon!) with some of BTC's problems addressed/fixed. I'm sure most of the software written for BTC (e-commerce plug-ins, charting, mining, pools, exchanges, you name it) can be modified to work with a different blockchain or similar product.

I mean, we've all had this BTC adventure, and many of us are sitting on a crapload of hashing power, whether the cards are hot, warm or room temperature. I just KNOW that *someone* will come up with a replacement if BTC becomes unviable for whatever reason.  Or, BTC itself will recover.

[runlinux]

im still in with my "free" electricity here in the office.

worst case, i have some nice gaming cards! its a win/win here.

[AngelusWebDesign]

According to your sigline, you're pulling 826 MH/s.
That's 0.42 BTC/day, or $2.01 at the current market rate for BTC ($4.80)

2 bucks.

Don't spend it all in one place 

While you're at it, you might consider collecting aluminum cans from the side of the road...

Hope you don't get in trouble and/or lose your job over it...

[Dargo]

Even if difficulty dropped by half -- not gonna happen, by the way -- you'd still be making the equivalent of 9.5 BTC per day at the current difficulty.

Still not much!

But the reality is that we're going to have a 2% or 3% drop in difficulty, in exchange for the price dropping from $11.50 to $4.80.  Would you call that a wash?

Between
the Zero Electricity Cost crowd
the Folding @ Home crowd (whose idea of "fun" is to spend their money on crunching numbers for science)
the "I've already set up my rigs, even if I make 25 cents a day it's worth it" crowd,
and
the "Bitcoin will be $100 each by this time next year...I'll keep mining for now, counting on that future increase" crowd

...we're not going to see much of a difficulty decrease.

So if a large difficulty decrease is what you're counting on, you might as well give up that idea now.

I think this is basically right. But there does seem to be a significant crowd looking for immediate profit (or maybe they are just really vocal on the forum?), and the mining farm crowd (are they really going to pay those high electric bills just for the fun of it, or based on speculation that prices will eventually go much higher?). Diffuculty won't drop by half, but it might drop 15 - 30% if prices stay low. And it won't happen in the next difficulty adjustment for sure. But anyone hoping for a drop in difficulty to entirely compensate for the drop in price is going to be disappointed.

[stryker]

little tip when mining, mine at a rate that means you can afford your electricity regardless of profitability :-)

Yes, bitcoin watch has shown a mining drop of around 500Ghash/s or so.... its hard to tell though when levels are typically as high as 12.9Th/s