No profit to be made even with 2TH machines?

[MadPom]

OK so I've got a 25Ghash butterfly labs machine up and running minepeon on a raspberry Pi.  Entry level proof of concept for a newbie if you like. 

Looking around at online calculators it looks like there's no point at all in putting any further money into any of the mining gear available new, pre-order otherwise.  Short of meteoric rises in bitcoin value there doesn't appear to anyway of getting your money back.

Do I understand correctly that if people stop making money and just switch off their machines that the level of difficulty would drop to ensure transactions are still processed.

What's the story are people pre-ordering new gear and crossing their fingers?  Right now the exchange rate seems very stable.

Look forward to some informed replies or specultation.

Cheers

[DPoS]

OK so I've got a 25Ghash butterfly labs machine up and running minepeon on a raspberry Pi.  Entry level proof of concept for a newbie if you like.  

Looking around at online calculators it looks like there's no point at all in putting any further money into any of the mining gear available new, pre-order otherwise.  Short of meteoric rises in bitcoin value there doesn't appear to anyway of getting your money back.

Do I understand correctly that if people stop making money and just switch off their machines that the level of difficulty would drop to ensure transactions are still processed.

What's the story are people pre-ordering new gear and crossing their fingers?  Right now the exchange rate seems very stable.

Look forward to some informed replies or specultation.

Cheers

Have you been in the world of business?  This phase surely has people doing accounting tricks to lower their cost basis so it is still profitable.
Whether they are getting a wholesale deal on the miners, having fun with deductions on their taxes, rolling 0% credit lines year to year, scamming cheap electricity, using miners to wash their dirty money..   who the hell knows, but the avg joe paying retail is basically mining as a privilege not a profit


My story was that I used mostly 0% credit (for a year) last June to buy two Jupiters and then some expansion modules and now I just rolled about half
of those expenses into another 0% offer that is good for 18 months.

Wall Street showed everyone how great it is to play with costfree future money

[empoweoqwj]

OK so I've got a 25Ghash butterfly labs machine up and running minepeon on a raspberry Pi.  Entry level proof of concept for a newbie if you like. 

Looking around at online calculators it looks like there's no point at all in putting any further money into any of the mining gear available new, pre-order otherwise.  Short of meteoric rises in bitcoin value there doesn't appear to anyway of getting your money back.

Do I understand correctly that if people stop making money and just switch off their machines that the level of difficulty would drop to ensure transactions are still processed.

What's the story are people pre-ordering new gear and crossing their fingers?  Right now the exchange rate seems very stable.

Look forward to some informed replies or specultation.

Cheers

You are right. There is no point buying bitcoin mining hardware at the moment if you want ROI.

Yes, if people turned their machines off "en massse" the difficulty would drop but its never going to happen.

People are pre-ordering and crossing everything

[djtriggz]

Of course the only way to make money is cloud hashing and pre orders

[empoweoqwj]

Of course the only way to make money is cloud hashing and pre orders

You can also lose money through cloud hashing and pre-orders

[Flinten]

If you are able to get Hardware for ~7$/GHS today it could be worth mining. With the average diff increase of the last months you could end up with a profit of 10%.

[Sonny]

Of course the only way to make money is cloud hashing and pre orders

Sarcasm? lol. 

[empoweoqwj]

Of course the only way to make money is cloud hashing and pre orders

Sarcasm? lol. 

Hard to tell .....

[navigator]

Most of these mining calculators are way off.

For instance one said that difficulty would be 2,221,000,000,000 by Dec-2014. That's over 1100 times the current network. I did a quick estimate and if the current network were all antminers, it would be worth about $180 million. So 1100 x $180 million is about ~$200 billion. So do you really think $200 billion dollars worth of antminers will be added before December?

Mining always trends towards barely profitable.

[Kenshin]

OK so I've got a 25Ghash butterfly labs machine up and running minepeon on a raspberry Pi.  Entry level proof of concept for a newbie if you like.  

Looking around at online calculators it looks like there's no point at all in putting any further money into any of the mining gear available new, pre-order otherwise.  Short of meteoric rises in bitcoin value there doesn't appear to anyway of getting your money back.

Do I understand correctly that if people stop making money and just switch off their machines that the level of difficulty would drop to ensure transactions are still processed.

What's the story are people pre-ordering new gear and crossing their fingers?  Right now the exchange rate seems very stable.

Look forward to some informed replies or specultation.

Cheers

Have you been in the world of business?  This phase surely has people doing accounting tricks to lower their cost basis so it is still profitable.
Whether they are getting a wholesale deal on the miners, having fun with deductions on their taxes, rolling 0% credit lines year to year, scamming cheap electricity, using miners to wash their dirty money..   who the hell knows, but the avg joe paying retail is basically mining as a privilege not a profit


My story was that I used mostly 0% credit (for a year) last June to buy two Jupiters and then some expansion modules and now I just rolled about half
of those expenses into another 0% offer that is good for 18 months.

Wall Street showed everyone how great it is to play with costfree future money

Great plan, you are a genius. I didn't exactly the same thing as you.  So I am a genius too. 

[Sonny]

Most of these mining calculators are way off.

For instance one said that difficulty would be 2,221,000,000,000 by Dec-2014. That's over 1100 times the current network. I did a quick estimate and if the current network were all antminers, it would be worth about $180 million. So 1100 x $180 million is about ~$200 billion. So do you really think $200 billion dollars worth of antminers will be added before December?

Mining always trends towards barely profitable.

I just checked the historical difficulty, and found that it has been growing exponentially (~10% at first, ~25% later on) every 2016 blocks for like a year. Of course, we shouldn't expect it to keep growing exponentially forever, but it is hard to tell when that trend will stop.

FYI: Difficulty was 6.7M 10 months ago, and will be around 2.6B in a few days.

[kendog77]

Most of these mining calculators are way off.

For instance one said that difficulty would be 2,221,000,000,000 by Dec-2014. That's over 1100 times the current network. I did a quick estimate and if the current network were all antminers, it would be worth about $180 million. So 1100 x $180 million is about ~$200 billion. So do you really think $200 billion dollars worth of antminers will be added before December?

Mining always trends towards barely profitable.

I just checked the historical difficulty, and found that it has been growing exponentially (~10% at first, ~25% later on) every 2016 blocks for like a year. Of course, we shouldn't expect it to keep growing exponentially forever, but it is hard to tell when that trend will stop.

FYI: Difficulty was 6.7M 10 months ago, and will be around 2.6B in a few days.

Yes, and that exponential jump corresponds to a major leap in mining technology from GPUs to ASICs where ASICs are ~1000 times more efficient. I would only expect to see very modest improvements in ASIC tech moving forward. Knc, Bitfury, Cointerra, and Hashfast have all shown that ~1W per GH at the wall is about the best we're going to get from ASIC tech moving forward.

I expect ASICs to continue to get more efficient, but the incremental improvements will be much smaller. I think the difficulty will level out in ~3 months unless the price of BTC explodes again. If the price of BTC explodes again, all bets are off and much more money will flow into mining hardware.

[pjviitas]

Most of these mining calculators are way off.

For instance one said that difficulty would be 2,221,000,000,000 by Dec-2014. That's over 1100 times the current network. I did a quick estimate and if the current network were all antminers, it would be worth about $180 million. So 1100 x $180 million is about ~$200 billion. So do you really think $200 billion dollars worth of antminers will be added before December?

Mining always trends towards barely profitable.

I just checked the historical difficulty, and found that it has been growing exponentially (~10% at first, ~25% later on) every 2016 blocks for like a year. Of course, we shouldn't expect it to keep growing exponentially forever, but it is hard to tell when that trend will stop.

FYI: Difficulty was 6.7M 10 months ago, and will be around 2.6B in a few days.

Yes, and that exponential jump corresponds to a major leap in mining technology from GPUs to ASICs where ASICs are ~1000 times more efficient. I would only expect to see very modest improvements in ASIC tech moving forward. Knc, Bitfury, Cointerra, and Hashfast have all shown that ~1W per GH at the wall is about the best we're going to get from ASIC tech moving forward.

I expect ASICs to continue to get more efficient, but the incremental improvements will be much smaller. I think the difficulty will level out in ~3 months unless the price of BTC explodes again. If the price of BTC explodes again, all bets are off and much more money will flow into mining hardware.

This is real interesting and has me wondering about the future of distributed mining.

For the average person, dedicating a room and a circuit breaker in their home will be the most they could do without starting to look at server room options.

With this in mind, a 15A breaker can generally provide about 1440W of continuous power safely which currently translates to around 800GH/s of hashing power...and this is pushing it.

Assuming your right about the 1W per GH, the maximum hashing power that the average person will be capable of would be around 1.6TH/s which by my estimates will only be earning 1BTC/month by the end of June.

If this is true there will be a huge shift to centralized mining facilities this year sometime which really worries me.

I really don't see how Bitcoin can survive centralized mining.

[MadPom]

Can't be sure but I'm guessing the problems with amperage only really apply to those countries running 110v domestic supplies.  So UK Aus. and NZ will probably hang in there a bit longer.  1-2 Kw is pretty average for old fashioned plug in electric heaters in the UK.  The general warning about not having too many appliances in one socket still applied.   UK domestic plugs have built in fuses from 3 - 13amp so your plug fuse should go before the house wiring.

"If this is true there will be a huge shift to centralized mining facilities this year sometime which really worries me.

I really don't see how Bitcoin can survive centralized mining"

Yep i'm looking at quite a bit of second hand stuff people are attempting to dump on TradeMe (NZ Ebay equivalent) most of it being offered at stupid prices that you'd be mad to pay. The price of second hand gear doesn't seem to take into account the fact that you can't make any money out of it. 

It may be that a few enthusiastic soles will keep low cost stuff running at a continual loss. I'll probably keep my butterfly labs 25gh machine running through into winter (southern hemisphere) at which point it might just be a self subsidising room heater for a few months.

What's needed to keep a balance of mining safely neutral is more low cost high efficiency miners and the introduction of transaction charges so even the little guys get enough reward to encourage them to stay plugged in? 

[HellDiverUK]

With this in mind, a 15A breaker can generally provide about 1440W of continuous power safely which currently translates to around 800GH/s of hashing power...and this is pushing it.

Here in the 1st World, we have 30A of 240V per ring, and most houses have at least two rings.  That's 7.2kW PER RING.  14.4kW per house, easily just from the sockets.

[sikke]

With this in mind, a 15A breaker can generally provide about 1440W of continuous power safely which currently translates to around 800GH/s of hashing power...and this is pushing it.

Here in the 1st World, we have 30A of 240V per ring, and most houses have at least two rings.  That's 7.2kW PER RING.  14.4kW per house, easily just from the sockets.

Yes agree.

Little bit more East houses have 3x 30A or 3x25A sparks.... average Sauna has 6-8kW electric stove in here.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sauna#Electric_stove_sauna
Electricity costs 0.12euro kWh

[TinkerTom]

I had a 50 Amp sub panel installed and added a 20A 110v circuit and a 30A 220v. I'd intend to keep the machines running as long as the cost isn't more than I can afford -- I look at it as part of the investment. I imagine what the guys who stopped mining with GPUs cause they couldn't do more than a coin a day would do to go back in time and keep those things running.

[frankenmint]

I had a 50 Amp sub panel installed and added a 20A 110v circuit and a 30A 220v. I'd intend to keep the machines running as long as the cost isn't more than I can afford -- I look at it as part of the investment. I imagine what the guys who stopped mining with GPUs cause they couldn't do more than a coin a day would do to go back in time and keep those things running.

EXACTLY!  I'm playing roulette with my circuits here, and while I think I've gotten things figured out...for now, I'm having to turn off my Avalon which pulls like 700W for a mere 60 Gh when my defective 1 blade antminer is still pulling 90+ GH off of 240 ish Watts. 

I still have an extra 1500 watts of electricity required for my soon to be built 1st scrypt rig.  Looking at homebuying options because its 36 degrees outside and 89 degrees inside. 

[pjviitas]

With this in mind, a 15A breaker can generally provide about 1440W of continuous power safely which currently translates to around 800GH/s of hashing power...and this is pushing it.

Here in the 1st World, we have 30A of 240V per ring, and most houses have at least two rings.  That's 7.2kW PER RING.  14.4kW per house, easily just from the sockets.

Don't get me wrong you can get up to 30kW on most single family detached houses built in the last 10 years its just that most families wouldn't put up with Bitcoin miners plugged in all over the house.

I understand that there are some people out there that have garages and 400A services however this is not the norm.

I am simply trying to illustrate that the average person with a room in their house dedicated for mining isn't going to be able to get more than about 1TH/s.

[oxfardk]

What's the story are people pre-ordering new gear and crossing their fingers?

some a lots people got scammed by Butterfly labs just because they decided to make pre-orders