What's your shutdown point?

[grod]

On BTC-E chat I saw someone talking to a guy with 10 6950s that's been mining since the peak and not selling.  He's holding 150 BTC.  For those playing the home game, that's a minimum of $250 in power and $3500 in video cards.  And a current market value of $390 for his output.  IMO this is the norm.  Lots of miners are in this boat, and they will keep on mining until they simply can't deny they've lost money.  Might take hardware failure for that to sink in.

The high hash rates on deepbit confirm it.

[wndrbr3d]

On BTC-E chat I saw someone talking to a guy with 10 6950s that's been mining since the peak and not selling. 

If that's the case, he's not mining, he's speculating.

[P4man]

To me, Bitcoin is not a machine which converts electricity into dollars. To me, Bitcoin is

* An interesting research topic
* A charming community full of good spirits and ideas
* and, above all, a great chance for a structural change in the monetary system somewhere down the road.

Why should I let my personal greed allow to do damage to these interesting goals?

Sure, but shutting down your miners will do nothing to prevent achieving those goals. You are not even helping secure the network as one might think, because by keeping unprofitable miners running "for the cause", you are just driving up difficulty and driving out other, rational miners with higher efficiency or cheaper electricity.

[Technomage]

Most miners who actually pay for electricity should shut down their rigs at this price point. It makes no sense to run them unless you expect the price to rise in the short / mid term (which is questionable). What is likely is difficulty dropping, so then just turn the rigs back on if diff drops enough.

I'm in the fortunate situation of paying a fixed fee for electricity but even in my situation I'm actually close to quitting because the value of the hardware goes down as time goes on. But the small profit I get right now compensates for that, barely.

I'm not expecting the price to go up in the near future but I'm expecting the difficulty to go down quite a bit, so I'm still hanging in there. For now.

And mining is indeed only one part of Bitcoin. My interest in Bitcoin is not going anywhere even if I have to quit my mining operations.

[ElectricMucus]

Most miners who actually pay for electricity should shut down their rigs at this price point. It makes no sense to run them unless you expect the price to rise in the short / mid term (which is questionable). What is likely is difficulty dropping, so then just turn the rigs back on if diff drops enough.

I'm in the fortunate situation of paying a fixed fee for electricity but even in my situation I'm actually close to quitting because the value of the hardware goes down as time goes on. But the small profit I get right now compensates for that, barely.

I'm not expecting the price to go up in the near future but I'm expecting the difficulty to go down quite a bit, so I'm still hanging in there. For now.

And mining is indeed only one part of Bitcoin. My interest in Bitcoin is not going anywhere even if I have to quit my mining operations.

I'm speculating on a Namecoin hype short to midterm but I don't really employ and rig, just my desktop with a 5770 and a Llano APU. If the price trend continues I think people like me (lots) will be the major contributor to the hashrate in opposed to a few big miners.
And wo knows maybe some people will give up on bitcoin completely, as they should if they aren't into it's real adaptation as a replacement for fiat currencies.

[cbeast]

The botminers may end up maintaining the network. Hopefully they won't kill the potential value of their own investment.

[jjiimm_64]

its getting close!!

4 of my rigs get more then 2.5 M/h  / watt, so I will leave those running .  but it is def getting close for the older rigs.

[petercyr]

I might reduce my mining power but for as long as I take part in the the bitcoin community / economy I'll at least keep one miner active. I ran SETI@Home for  a long time and got nothing for it. No reason not to run a bitcoin miner if I believe in bitcoin.

[plastic.elastic]

its getting close!!

4 of my rigs get more then 2.5 M/h  / watt, so I will leave those running .  but it is def getting close for the older rigs.

hmmm 5970?

pls dont tell me you just bought them

[DeathAndTaxes]

3x 5970 is an unbeatable efficiency engine.

No need for extender cables, dual power supplies, or high end board.  Find a AMD board w/ triple spaced PCIEx16 slots (1,4,7).  Add 3x 5970, sempron CPU, 2GB of ram, USB drive running copy of linux & cgminer and a nice 88%+ effecient 1200W powersupply and you have about as efficient of a setup that you can get without going to FPGA.

Tonight I had a 5 min power outage so I was able to plug two of my 3x5970 rigs into kill-a-watts before powering them up.  ~870W, ~2150MH =  2.47 MH/W from the wall.

To those who believe sub $2/BTC energy cost is impossible even w/ cheap electricity .... check your efficiency (at the wall).  If you are not getting >2MH/W you need to adapt or power down.

When BTC was $30USD anyone could grab any random junk and be profitable even w/ $0.30/kWh power costs.  Those days are gone and likely never coming back.  If someday (a decade from now) BTC is $30USD it will be because we are at 10 million difficulty. 

Today you need to be lean & mean and that means 6+ GPU per rig. 

[jjiimm_64]

its getting close!!

4 of my rigs get more then 2.5 M/h  / watt, so I will leave those running .  but it is def getting close for the older rigs.

hmmm 5970?

pls dont tell me you just bought them

Yes, I just bot them from newegg at 399 each.   getting 2908 Mhsh at 1190 watts at the wall.   

here is a couple of pics.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/112408294399222065988/albums/5658727447810944545

[fizzisist]

Now that this is sitting on my desk, I need to recalculate: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.msg584606#msg584606

It's mining right now at 250 MH/s and consuming exactly 17 W (measured at the board). Using DeathAndTaxes' terminology and $0.149/kWh, that's like buying a block for $17.75, or $0.35/BTC!

I guess that's my new shutdown point!

[nebiki]

my shutdown point is $15. just wanted to say hi again from europe, where electricity actually costs money.

[sadpandatech]

Now that this is sitting on my desk, I need to recalculate: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=40058.msg584606#msg584606

It's mining right now at 250 MH/s and consuming exactly 17 W (measured at the board). Using DeathAndTaxes' terminology and $0.149/kWh, that's like buying a block for $17.75, or $0.35/BTC!

I guess that's my new shutdown point!

  That is the hottest thing I've seen so far this morning!! (wife still sleeping  )

[P4man]

You can not define a shutdown point as BTC/$ and ignore difficulty.

Difficulty is of course indirectly related to BTC/$ but its effect is that long term profitability is not dependent on BTC/$ but only on your MH/$ compared to the rest of the world. As such that FPGA will likely be profitable for the foreseeable future no matter BTC price, and EU or other GPU miners with high electricity costs will never be profitable for sustained periods of time. At most during short windows of opportunity when the network hash rate and difficulty havent caught up with a higher price yet.

[wndrbr3d]

You can not define a shutdown point as BTC/$ and ignore difficulty.

Difficulty is of course indirectly related to BTC/$ but its effect is that long term profitability is not dependent on BTC/$ but only on your MH/$ compared to the rest of the world. As such that FPGA will likely be profitable for the foreseeable future no matter BTC price, and EU or other GPU miners with high electricity costs will never be profitable for sustained periods of time. At most during short windows of opportunity when the network hash rate and difficulty havent caught up with a higher price yet.

You can totally define a shutdown point of BTC/$ because calculating that REQUIRES you include difficulty. Otherwise you wouldn't know how many BTC you generate per watt.

I still don't buy into the idea of FPGA being the future due to the astronomical startup costs when compared to CPU. I think the current CHEAPEST solution commercially available out there is somewhere in the range of ~$200 for 100Mhash? Even at lower difficulties, it would take FOR EVER just to earn back your initial investment, let alone make profit beyond that (assuming bitcoin doesn't recover back to $10).

[P4man]

You can totally define a shutdown point of BTC/$ because calculating that REQUIRES you include difficulty. Otherwise you wouldn't know how many BTC you generate per watt.

Hmm? Where exactly do you see watt or difficulty in "my shutdown point is $2 per BTC" ?

In theory bitcoin mining can be profitable at $0.02/BTC and unprofitable at $200/BTC with the very same rig and the very same electricity cost. It all depends on difficulty and therefore, all the other miners.

[fizzisist]

You can not define a shutdown point as BTC/$ and ignore difficulty.

Difficulty is of course indirectly related to BTC/$ but its effect is that long term profitability is not dependent on BTC/$ but only on your MH/$ compared to the rest of the world. As such that FPGA will likely be profitable for the foreseeable future no matter BTC price, and EU or other GPU miners with high electricity costs will never be profitable for sustained periods of time. At most during short windows of opportunity when the network hash rate and difficulty havent caught up with a higher price yet.

You're right, we should say that it is our shutdown point at the current difficulty. Even better would be to define the ratio of difficulty/price, but you would have to recalculate the ratio all the time.. On the other hand, the USD/BTC price is plastered everywhere so you can keep tabs on it easily. When the diffficulty changes you just have to scale your shutdown point (in USD) by the same amount.

E.g., if the difficulty rises by 10%, my shutdown point in USD/BTC goes up by the same amount. My $0.35 shutdown point would go up to $0.385. You only have to recalculate this every two weeks.

[TurboK]

When the payment arrives for my videocard. So, next week at latest.

[error]

I will shut down when an uncorrectable flaw is found in one of Bitcoin's algorithms, making it unusable.