Mining difficulty slowing down over the next 3 months?

[elysid]

Dunno if it's been just me, but the last few miner offerings over the past couple of weeks have been kinda "meh."  Advances in energy consumption have been made, yes, but the general tone I've been hearing is, 'we'll, why not get a bunch of antminer s1's right now for less?'

Plus the difficulty increase chart @ http://bitcoin.sipa.be has been on a steady decline lately...

To be fair though, I haven't been following the ASICMINER securities thread... and the custom hardware thread has been looking like this:  http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ZomwVcGt0LE. 'cept, you replace 24 hours wif 2 weeks.   

Wild guess:  difficulty increases over the next 10 weeks or so won't exceed 17.5% per adjustment period.

Any insight?  thanks.

[ChuckBuck]

This is merely the calm before the storm.

BFL, KNC, AsicMiner, and Black Arrow have yet to ship.  Expect late spring to mid summer to see the difficulty spikes.

[nwfella]

This is merely the calm before the storm.

BFL, KNC, AsicMiner, and Black Arrow have yet to ship.  Expect late spring to mid summer to see the difficulty spikes.

+1

*It's gunna get ugly. 

[Nagle]

At some point, everybody mining productively should be using state of the art ASICs, selling for slightly above production cost, and then the rate of increase should slow down to a Moore's Law increase rate or less. How far away is that?

[-ck]

At some point, everybody mining productively should be using state of the art ASICs, selling for slightly above production cost, and then the rate of increase should slow down to a Moore's Law increase rate or less. How far away is that?

About a year away.

[ajw7989]

like previous people said the difficulty increase has not been huge yet because the newer bigger 1th+ machines have not shipped yet. HOwever this is going to start occuring next month when bitmain ships the s2 1th machines. Once they start they will continue to ship every week or so and the difficulty increase will start shooting up. Once the competition joins in expect it to go up further. In my opinion a lot of the older machines will become unprofitable with the way bitcoin price is currently.

[Searing]

This is merely the calm before the storm.

BFL, KNC, AsicMiner, and Black Arrow have yet to ship.  Expect late spring to mid summer to see the difficulty spikes.

+1

*It's gunna get ugly.  

well even with knc neptunes hitting the market end of spring and the rest (with cancellations on neptunes i'd figure the most is 2000 units)
and the rest of the stuff ...BFL stuff while a lot and probably dumped in 1 month we are talking 600gh for most of their monarchs on ave
even with the super monarch.....1TH asic miners need to have a bunch which i guess is possible

but i mean really from end of spring till say middle of fall when i assume the next batch of equip preorders will arrive (hello 40th)....

i myself can't see much more then 10-15% difficulty change from end of spring till middle of fall when the next batch of equip
bounces out the door

and of course there is outdated equip falling off the other end of the ship even at 10-15% difficutly (ie my 555gh oct knc jupiter for example)

anyway I just see it in that light

(of course I am likely wrong due to blind self interest in that i have a very 1st of 10 or so customer service Neptune 3-4TH batch one yet
last one hanging on ...was a really bad winter in minnesota want to mine and play...kept me sane ...heh )

anyway what i'm going with now (i can refund this last neptune up till shipping) but likely this will be my last home unit...and the kNC Titan
scrypt miner is now no refund..so this is the last i'll be able to play this game with anybody me thinks...kinda liked this hedge but me thinks
refunding miners esp if they are 20k and commercial or virtual miners this fall ...that boat has sunk)

anyway again...just taking the oppisite view i've no idea? thoughts?

(on a side not BTC drops to 300 bucks the neptune is toast ...i'm sentimental but that would be silly)


er an again i refer you to the last column on this link ...the left chart on the bottom.....as the basis as noted above for my above
'guesswork"

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ actual daily growth rate
ie bitcoin network actual speed GROWTH...

anyway comments?

Searing
 

[jeppe]

i think it can go all from 10%-25% no one knows.

[fairlay]

people how are willing to put money on it clearly think it will at least not slow down dramatically. They expect the difficulty to be >10B in less then 3 month. https://www.fairlay.com/bet/registered/new/bitcoin-difficulty-10b/

[elysid]

cool, thanks for your responses.

part of why I figured that the difficulty would slow down over that time period is a combination of the short-term price trend (which IMO seems to be largely motivated by many people just waiting for when legacy financial institutions start wanting a piece of the bitcoin action) with the relatively high cost of the upcoming generation of untested terahash ASICs (relative to what I think is the majority of current bitcoin enthusiasts who have only been aware of the technology because of the 2013 runups). 

'course, the next bubble could happen sooner than I anticipate, driving demand for ASICs... :shrug: 

so yeah, I guess my prediction is more based on the exchange rate more than anything else.  than again, i think I may be grossly underestimating the buying power & demand of the early adopters.

maybe it's off topic, but is there a noticeable trend in regards to demand for mining hardware among different generations of bitcoin adopters?  (is there even a way to place them into distinct groups, prolly delineated by time periods such as price runups or news events?)

all these questions abound since i've been thinking of getting another antminer while these bitcoins are soooo cheap.

[davecoin]

+1 on the coming storm.  Friedcat is predicted to deliver between 400 and 1600PH.   We also have KNC, BFL, BlackArrow, Bitmine (plus other A1 gear), and now Spondoolies hardware coming online between now and August.  It's going to get really tough to keep up.

Asicminer reference:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg5025422#msg5025422

[skuser]

If you look at bitcoin.sipa.be short term hashrate charts, there are brutal hashrate spikes happening already now, some sites like currenthashrate.com reporting over 50 PH/s in shortterm window, so it's really hard to say if it's just variance or real power added to network. Every variance spike became eventually standard network hashrate and at 50 PH/s you are at diificulty 7 bilions, which is 60% from current point. Even next difficulty due to happen in 2 days seems to touch 20% again.

It is extremely hard to estimate anything here but for me it looks like storm is starting right now

[atc1]

Yes the Difficulty can go down and it has in the past, but it will most likely only be for one or a couple of difficulty changes before it will start rising again.

One possibility would be if for example a very large Bitcoin mining farm would be down for a longer period of time for example if there having technical difficulty or need to relocate to another country or sells the hardware because of electricity cost is making there mining less profitable or unprofitable.

Another possible could be if bitcoin price would make a relatively rapid and big change down in price(ex 10 000 usd/coin down to 2000 usd/coin) and it stayed there for several weeks/months sometime in the future when the "normal" hash-rate increase per difficulty-period is small(1-3%) that could lead to people in large numbers would stop mining or selling/relocating hardware to places/people/country's where electricity price would be lower or in some cases possibly even free.

A third possibility would be that large amount of obsolete mining equipment would end there life as seasonal dependent heating devices replacing/backing up existing electrical heaters witch could then lead to that difficulty could see some decrease in the spring/summer period if the majority of those miners is located on the northern hemisphere.

[Searing]

+1 on the coming storm.  Friedcat is predicted to deliver between 400 and 1600PH.   We also have KNC, BFL, BlackArrow, Bitmine (plus other A1 gear), and now Spondoolies hardware coming online between now and August.  It's going to get really tough to keep up.

Asicminer reference:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg5025422#msg5025422

that is what has me stumped....as the network grows it becomes harder and harder to hit a 15% to 20% of network growth each diff change..cause the network is getting bigger and obsolete equip is .falling off the other end of the difficulty ship.....esp with price drop imho..I'm guessing of course...but can't see enough 'umph" in the present crop of miners (late spring early summer) to pop it up that high..again likely wrong.....now if your talking this FALL 2014 yeah i agree with everything you say....with the next product go around generation... (likely 40TH for 20k then) BUT imho with Neptune pop'ing out at end of spring..the amount of units needed  i don't see happening exp at a 575 yo 600 usd btc rate ..a lot of those quys who got Neptune (any batch) have pulled their orders or at least their 'extra' 2nd order (easy to be brave of was till titan with knc in they refund) or so the folks are crying about on the knc Swedish miner thread on bitcointalk.

I supposedly have 5K of BFL money refund coming back on the upgrade of my April 2013 stuff to a monarch .forced to upgrade or get 65mm bricks i might add....i thought that money was lost for sure...but ..6 months late they sent an email i can take a refund or get a 1th card instead with another 600gh card at end of que...yeah right ....i prefer to jump off the bfl boat with the 5K life preserver.....so feeling brave on my last knc neptune order (delusion)

anyway part of the reason I'm hanging on to my 1st batch neptune (with refund option) I really really wanna believe......

but anyway the current delusion I'm going with this week anyway

Searing

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

+1 on the coming storm.  Friedcat is predicted to deliver between 400 and 1600PH.   We also have KNC, BFL, BlackArrow, Bitmine (plus other A1 gear), and now Spondoolies hardware coming online between now and August.  It's going to get really tough to keep up.

Asicminer reference:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg5025422#msg5025422

Man that's huge. This would take the difficulty to roughly ~200 billion, give or take a few billion.

[Entropy-uc]

+1 on the coming storm.  Friedcat is predicted to deliver between 400 and 1600PH.   We also have KNC, BFL, BlackArrow, Bitmine (plus other A1 gear), and now Spondoolies hardware coming online between now and August.  It's going to get really tough to keep up.

Asicminer reference:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=99497.msg5025422#msg5025422

Man that's huge. This would take the difficulty to roughly ~200 billion, give or take a few billion.

It's also utter nonsense.  Asicminer has on the order of 500 KW of hashing capacity in Hong Kong.  If they meet their power targets, that would let them deploy 1 Ph/s of gear.  The rest would have to be sold.  There are no buyers of hashing at today's difficulty and $4 / Gh/s.  To sell even 10 Ph/s prices would have to be under $2 Gh/s.  And Friedcat's history suggest he prefers to optimize for $ / Gh/s rather than total revenue.

The well of fools willing to pay any price for hashing has been drained, mostly by Friedcat himself.  Your customers can't buy from you again if you cut their throats the first time. Friedcat may sell a lot of gear, but he'd have to be giving it away to sell 40 Ph/s in the next few months.

[Lamber]

is asicminer still mining with their first gen asics ? Or they sold them to customers already ?

[lightfoot]

I have to agree; I was thinking we might have a few sets of 10% increases, but it looks like another 20% coming, and more on the way.

Not sure where all this power is coming from. I guess it could be antminers. Whatever the case, I'm looking at turning my 65nm equipment to "max efficiency" mode by June and probably shutting them down by August.

Side thought: If transactions don't pick up then bitcoin is going to have a problem. With more Tx fees, the difficulty problem would be somewhat mitigated. Doesn't seem to be happening.

[klondike_bar]

I have to agree; I was thinking we might have a few sets of 10% increases, but it looks like another 20% coming, and more on the way.

Not sure where all this power is coming from. I guess it could be antminers. Whatever the case, I'm looking at turning my 65nm equipment to "max efficiency" mode by June and probably shutting them down by August.

Side thought: If transactions don't pick up then bitcoin is going to have a problem. With more Tx fees, the difficulty problem would be somewhat mitigated. Doesn't seem to be happening.

those 1TH dragon miners - china does something well and thats mass-production. those things are just starting to flood the market

[envy2010]

The limit on difficulty is a combination of hardware efficiency and BTC value. At $600 BTC, 28nm tech has a very hard time reaching ROI when the difficulty goes over 100B. 65 and 40 nm tech limits out much lower, so regardless of how much hashpower ships the 20% increases every 11 days are only going to continue for 3-6 more months, or until BTC value jumps again.

I personally think we will see 20 to 25B by mid-July, then BTC will go on another run.