It is 2020 time for a new diff thread.

[mikeywith]

Current Pace:   114.8406%  (1998 / 1739.80 expected, 258.2 ahead)
Current Difficulty:   13732352106018.34
Next Difficulty:   between 15770387238294 and 15770573838797
Next Difficulty Change:   between +14.8411% and +14.8425%

Almost 100% of the difficulty drop post halving (-6% -9.25%) is going to be wiped out in 2 hours, we are going straight back to early May difficulty, price hasn't changed much post halving, so is difficulty (judging by what's going to happen in 2 hours) yet rewards dropped 50%, in plain English this is will be "the final nail in the coffin" for many of those guys who own 60-70w gears and not the best power rate.

Meanwhile, miners with free or super cheap power rates are still adding on cheap gears such as S9s and the like, other miners who positioned themselves pretty well prior to the halving will probably be adding 30-40w/th gears non-stop, so it's a matter of a few months until many of those miners who were counting on the difficulty to save them from the halving realize that mining isn't an easy game.

Interesting and sad times are ahead, and with bitcoin price not making any higher highs, rest assured that no mining operation is safe long run without proper planning.

What to do?

if I were paying 5-6 cents for power, I would start acting right away, it's time to start utilizing the profit from previous months/years and investing it in positioning myself better as far as efficiency is concerned, I would get rid of anything that isn't 45w/th or more efficient.

[philipma1957]

we are now at 15.7

ATH was 16.6 IIRC

1th earns 0.00000786 btc a day at viabtc

10th earns 0.00007860 btc a day at viabtc

100th earns 0.0007860 btc a day at viabtc all 'free' power numbers.

so $7.45 a day

a s19 would earn about  7.08 a day with free power costs about 2000 and takes 282 days with diff and price flat to pay off.

no one has 'free' power  since gear breaks and travel time and labor all have a cost.

so pretend 1 cent is minimum   also use high estimate and say 3.412 kwatts an hour or 82 kwatts a day about 82 cents.

so

s19 makes

6.25  at free power adjusted to 1 penny  so pay off is 282 to 320 days
5.43  at 1 cent adjust to 2 cents ................pay off    320 to 368 days
4.61 at 2 cent adjust to 3 cents  ................ pay off   368 to 433 days
3.79 at 3 cent adjust to 4 cents  ................ pay off   433 to 527 days
2.97 at 4 cent adjust to 5 cents  ................ pay off   527 to 673 days
2.15 at 5 cent adjust to 6 cents ................. pay off   673 to 930 days

so if you have 5 cent power s19 looks very shaky.

[DaveF]

I do have "free" power. We pay a flat rate for rack space in the DC and it comes with 20A.
If I have 3 routers pulling 1A each I pay for 20A
If I have 3 routers pulling 1A each and a miner pulling 15A I pay for 20A

Guess what some of my racks have in them. 
So with that being said I am more concerned about the power draw of the miners. Many of the newer more powerful & efficient ones are bumping on the limit of what I can safely  put in without worrying about what happens if I have to add more routers / switches.

So how many people out there are like me? More concerned with what I can use more then how efficient they are. Buying 1 or 2 gens out like I do totally changes the pricing dynamic too. That is what is keeping a lot of small miners running. How much does that add to the hashrate worldwide? 1EH? More? Less?

Just something to think about.

-Dave

[philipma1957]

Way more then 1eh

if you look at the analysis I do with viabtc     104 of 134 payments range from 0.01 to 0.1 btc which means a lot of miners on viabtc mine in the 250 th to 10ph range.

I suspect that ½  of viabtc is  is in the range we speak of viabtc alone is 6.2 eh  ½ is 3.1 eh

other pools are like this

my guess is niche miners like you and me and mikeywith are more then 20% of the network.

maybe 40eh worth of the network hash.

My place can give me 200kwatts well 80% so  160k-watts  I am around 110k-watt right now  I am consolidating and deciding what to do next.

Between the cover-19 the protests and the riots 2020 oh the ½ ing 2020 has been slow.

I am mining and holding more then anything else. I just wait for a moment to pull the trigger again.

[mikeywith]

Guess what some of my racks have in them.  

fish tank bulb?  

So how many people out there are like me? More concerned with what I can use more then how efficient they are. Buying 1 or 2 gens out like I do totally changes the pricing dynamic too. That is what is keeping a lot of small miners running. How much does that add to the hashrate worldwide? 1EH? More?

I have to agree to phill, I believe "we" make more than a quarter of the total hashrate, although these "free" limitations differ form a place to another, for an example, I have a small farm of 30kw, I don't pay for power there, but I pay a small amount of money in a form of rent.

So I can run about 25* S9s and that will be about 350th in total, but I don't go that route with this farm anymore, so I mix T17,S17pro,S17+, M21s and A few S9s to maximize the hashrate and to also keep the initial investment as low as possible.

In another place, I have access to a 300KW transformer, that's a lot of power so we are filling it with mainly S9s and a few more efficient gears, the reason I chose to add a few efficient gears is merely for testing what to upgrade to next year when S9s start making little to no profit even at 0 power rate, meanwhile, I am leaning towards M21s, if we could squeeze 90 of them at the right price, there will be about 5PH in that farm alone, but this won't and can't be done in a lump sum, luckily there are many people here who would want to buy those S9s at a much better price than probably any other where, so the plan is to slowly get rid of those S9s by year end or early 2021, hopefully by end of 2021 we hit the 5PH mark on that farm with 0 bitmain gears ( can't wait to divorce Bitmain)  

I have a few places where I put some miners here and there, one of them is 10kw only, but I don't pay rent or anything like that so the majority are S9, and most of my clients here can be divided into 2 groups

1- small miners who use their garage or an empty room, those have access to almost free power but it's pretty limited, so they usually get mid-range efficiency gears like the 17 series.

2-larger miners who can afford to build farms and buy those expensive 11kv > 220v transformers focus on nothing but the cost per th, everything else is NOISE to them, some are still buying those m3x gears burning 2000w to get a 12th.

The second group is the "scary" one, and they are not limited to where I live, They are almost in every continent, probably Europe and North America have the smallest shares, there are in South America, Africa and plenty of them in Asia, those guys send every rational calculation someone can make to predict their mining rewards in the future to the trash because they mine outside of the game rules.

[philipma1957]

Yeah. So like me but I am on a small scale I have 28 s9's. well after making 10 into heaters I have 18 s9's

    Most are running on lowest setting.
 My better gear runs on higher settings.

I can shift quick.    1.2ph to 1.4ph to 1.0ph

If I want to expand We could toss all the paid off gear and get better gear but I don't need to do so.

I am thinking of getting some gear from pangolinminer.com. maybe a  few m20s


So it looks like a lot of marginal gear was shut down first few days of the jump.

So maybe. a lot of people are doing what I am doing.  I dropped mine down to 1.2. from 1.4.  and if we go -10% on diff I will bounce from 1.2 back to 1.4

I will play this game all the way to Christmas as it will be turning a profit.

[mikeywith]

Looks like we are going to have a small relief in difficulty.

Current Pace:   96.0957%  (863 / 898.06 expected, 35.06 behind)
Current Difficulty:   15784744305477.41
Next Difficulty:   between 15171030193302 and 15366455052471
Next Difficulty Change:   between -3.8880% and -2.6500%

I don't think we will have any major drops anymore, but not going up in itself is overall good for us miners, what is considered to be bad news coming in from Bitmain seems like good news to everyone else who doesn't have a pending order from Bitmain, Zhan who now controls the supply warehouses of Bitmain has paused all shipping operations, because all payments are controlled by Jihan Wu, so the former has the gears in control and the latter has ownership of funds, and we all know how complicated the Chinese law is, so it might be a good while before Bitmain ships anything which would help with sustaining difficulty adjustments with either small drops or flat numbers for a few coming adjustments.

[philipma1957]

Works for me no gear ships 🚢 til october and diff floats in the 14-17 range.

[minefarmbuy]

MicroBT has a reasonable amount of inventory available to ship now so I wouldn't expect any large diff drops either. 17 would be pretty impressive short term but Oct seems reasonable to hit that number especially if bitmain situation gets sorted out.

[alh]

Well over halfway through the current epoch, witch a SMALL decline in difficulty predicted.

BTC price certainly isn't going to push difficulty: $9300/BTC

[mikeywith]

MicroBT has a reasonable amount of inventory available to ship now so I wouldn't expect any large diff drops either.

The current prices on Microbt gears are very high, the M30S++ 110th sells for $3,400 and does 31w/th, on the other hand, the last batch of S19 pro went for $2,407 and does 29.5w/th (slightly more efficient) and $1000 cheaper and ships only month later, with free power you need 4 months to ROI the price difference, not very encouraging if you ask me.

When Bitmain went out of stock due to their internal issues, MicroBt raised its gear prices, M21s was about $600 and now it's 800$ that's 33% increment, mind you profitability has gone lower than before so the price increment is simply due to the fact that Bitmain went out of stock and looks like MicroBT don't have enough gears to handle the market alone at those prices so the easiest thing to do was to boost prices.

I hope Bitmain rivals take this chance to gain more popularity and to improve, this is a huge opportunity for them that might not repeat itself in years to come.

[philipma1957]

I cut out all my high watt per th gear.

the 1.7 ph gear is under 50 watts a th.

the 1gh of ltc is only 1.5 Kwatts.

At the moment we make $90 usd a day profit my share is $22.50 a day but and this is big it is all paid for.

Making only $22.50 a day means don't buy gear just hold the coins.

So I am in a mine and hold mode.  We can do this a long time

We were making $280 a day.

 My share was $140  As I had purchased most of the gear for a while I collected 1/2 the profits.

But once gear was fully paid I went back to 1/4 the profits.

So to be honest it is very easy to run but I would like to earn more then I am.

For me to get a m20s at 1500 I get about 4 a day profit from it.  that is around a 375 day pay off.

Reality is we would give me 1/2.   90. which is 45 a day and my 1500 laid out. It  would  be paid off in 34 days.

1 would be mine and 1/2 would be buy solar.  

It almost makes sense to get it at 1500. but it would be a no brainer at 1200. I am talking shipping and tax included.

I don't like to wait for gear purchases.  But with every thing happening I think I need to do this.  Just mine and hold.

Next jump should be -2%. which means we may clear  92 a day vs 90.

[mikeywith]

So I am in a mine and hold mode.  We can do this a long time

With the current mining gear prices, this is the best thing to do, most experienced miners have already positioned themselves pre-halving to stay profitble post-halving, what I do with mining profit now is basically day trading it trying to increase it while keeping the risk as minimal as I can, the initial plan was to slowly add M21s gears but because of Bitmain's internal issues, prices have increased a lot which makes buying gears at current prices a terrible idea, so I might just accumulate and when the right time comes I'd go lump-sump on adding mining gears instead of gradually accruing them, this, of course, that depends on the price of those gears for the next a few months.

Meanwhile, this is what we have

Current Pace:   99.1908%  (1463 / 1474.93 expected, 11.93 behind)
Next Difficulty Change:   between -0.7990% and -0.7393%

3 days to go, and looks like <1% drop in difficulty.

[Biffa]

Looking more like an increase

[philipma1957]

yeah a hard push the last day and we are now at

Latest Block:   637028  (31 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   99.9948%  (1989 / 1989.10 expected, 0.1 behind)
Current Difficulty:   15784744305477.41
Next Difficulty:   between 15785124249565 and 15785124317729
Next Difficulty Change:   between +0.0024% and +0.0024%
Previous Retarget:   June 16, 2020 at 12:49 PM
Next Retarget (earliest):   Today at 12:50 PM  (in 0d 4h 30m 0s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Today at 12:50 PM  (in 0d 4h 30m 0s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 14d 0h 1m 3s and 14d 0h 1m 3s

maybe we get 0%  

[favebook]

That would be fun, first time in history that difficulty does not change?

But since there is 2 hours left and -0.1% is predicted, there is no chance we can hit 0%

[Philipma1957cellphone]

So it took around 14 days and 2 minutes which is really close to zero or down it may be the closest ever to zero

[stompix]

So, we still got a decrease;D at - 0.0033%

If the entire hash rate would be made out of s9, it would mean 270 miners have been turned off and not replaced by new gear. The only times recently that anything close to this happened was in March and May 2019, at - 0.05 %, and +0.04%  but even those are 100 times bigger percentage terms, if we go below 0.01 we haven't seen such a thing ever, excluding the first blocks when the difficulty was constant at 1.

[philipma1957]

So it took around 14 days and 2 minutes which is really close to zero. or down It may be the closest ever to zero.

I have no idea what auto check did here.

0% and a stable price works for me.  We are turning a small profit. My share is around 700 a month.

Clifton mining area is running hot every time we get to 91-93f. 4 units shut down.  I can turn them back on at night.
We are going to try moving the venting around. As I rather we run at 1200th and not 1010th.  The warehouse owners 10 s17 pros have been dropped to normal from turbo. so he is doing 520th vs 550 th.

Diff is drifting higher

Bitcoin Difficulty Estimator (by /u/archaeal)
(page refreshes automatically) (all times local)
Latest Block:   637183  (45 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   103.1395%  (128 / 124.10 expected, 3.9 ahead)
Current Difficulty:   15784217546288.15
Next Difficulty:   between 15884892182809 and 16642052969149
Next Difficulty Change:   between +0.6378% and +5.4348%
Previous Retarget:   Yesterday at 12:51 PM
Next Retarget (earliest):   July 14, 2020 at 2:38 AM  (in 12d 17h 5m 18s)
Next Retarget (latest):   July 14, 2020 at 11:36 AM  (in 13d 2h 3m 30s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 13h 46m 20s and 13d 22h 44m 32s

[citronick]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/robertanzalone/2020/05/08/riot-blockchain-buys-an-additional-1040-new-mining-machines-from-bitman

Phil ... expect another thousand of S19s going online soon.