2021, time for a new general & diff speculation thread...

[stompix]

Going with the assumption that this is accurate, 5% of the total hashrate from the last epoch is 8EH, since this can't be the 19 series since those are still profitable even with high rates of power, let's assume those are old S9s and T17s, so maybe in the range of 70w/t per miner on average, so anywhere between 25-30th per miner in respect to w/th, this means at least 266,666  (quarter of a million) are not profitable below 50k.

There is one thing bugging me, well, actually more but let's just focus on this as my brain is already fried just from the numbers. If this gear is not profitable below 50k, why the xyz was this even mining in the last epoch which ended on the 19th when the price broke 50k for the first time on the 16th (temporary) and when above it constantly only on the 18th?

I've been looking at those numbers and charts users have posted here and I don't get it, it can't enter my stupid head. Back in November at 13k, we peak briefly at 19t difficulty, it dropped and we assumed at that time that's the number of old gear that is not being able to keep the profit running, but right now we are barely 5% up from those times with what, an average of 40k during the last epoch? No matter how much I look at the profitability of old gear that might get turned on and off unless  I add in the mystery of S19pro replacing tons of S9 that were running at an almost unbelievable rate during this interval I simply can't see any other explanation that this is all random luck and poll operators take turns stepping into dog poo for it.

It's simple to realize why we're not going up, there is no gear available for it, this can be easily checked, but why we're dropping? No! Last thread I was close to saying I'm going to stop making predictions but right now I'm close to saying I will stop trying to understand it.

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[alh]

We are gaining ground compared to my last update: 762/769 expected (only 7 behind now)While this currently is showing a small possible decrease, my actual bet is that we'll end up on the positive side before the epoch is over (about 9 days away). BTC prices has firmed up a bit at $50,374.

[wndsnb]

Even if you're running your S9s in normal mode at 90W/TH, and you're paying 10c/kWh for power, the price would need to fall below $37,000 at the current diff to be unprofitable. So I don't think anyone is turning off gear because it is not profitable anymore.

But I could see people taking gear offline to sell it. It would be pretty tempting to offload all your >=55W/th gear when people are paying >50$/th for it. So it could be that every time we have another pump in the price, another round of big mining operations take the opportunity to cash out and then the network hashrate falls while the gear is in transit to it's new owners.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Speaking of power, Blokforge has Canaan's A1246 available with a sliding scale price of $4,550.00 USD – $10,250.00 USD depending on delivery dates. The $4,550 for Sept delivery and $10,250 is for in-stock (2 left) with monthly batch delivery dates/prices.

Running 90T @ 3,420W they are touting 38w/T with is pretty damn good for Canaan gear. I'm mighty tempted to pick one up, perhaps a May delivery one for $5,800.00

[wndsnb]

If you have 5c power and expect the diff and price to be flat for the next 6 months, then that $10,250 miner will profit a bit more than $4000 in the 6 months you'd need to wait for the September batch. So looks like the only way you can rationalize spending the $ to get it now is if you're convinced the price is going to keep going straight up and the diff is going to be flat.

[mikeywith]

Even if you're running your S9s in normal mode at 90W/TH, and you're paying 10c/kWh for power, the price would need to fall below $37,000 at the current diff to be unprofitable. So I don't think anyone is turning off gear because it is not profitable anymore.

People are buying S9s even in Europe, which means they are running them at way higher power rates than just 10 cents.

Kwh cost   Minimum Price

5c   25k
6c   25k
7c   30k
8c     35k
9c     35k
10c   40k
11c   45k
12c   50k
13c   50k
14c   55k
15c   55k
16c   60k
17c   65k

That is quick math, ignoring everything between those numbers, so for example, 16 cents could still make a tiny profit between 60k and 55k, but the profit would be too small anyway, and I used 1250w to 14th which is about 89w/th, so when the price goes below 50k everything above 13 cents becomes unprofitable, I can only imagine that there are a good amount of gears that run at above 10 cents khw, of course we can't be certain that they will shut down right after the price crosses their profit-line, and they could just mine at a lose hopping that coin prices will go higher soon.

But I could see people taking gear offline to sell it.

You are right, selling is another factor, but judging by the listing I see on the telegram, there does not seem to be any major re-allocation of gears, a few months back we see WTS/WTB orders of 20,000S9s for example every once in a while, things like 3,000 T71 were every day's usual, the past couple weeks have been really quiet, today's listing is all about fans and some used PSUs.

One of my Malaysian friends said he can't source any reasonable quantity of S9 in China, they say some Russian whales took everything a few weeks ago, to me, it seems like the selling was over, and the majority of people who now have a mining gear that's generating these instance profits will not likely going to sell, I mean at least the whales that make the difference not the average joe with his 5 S9s, although I do believe that pretty soon they will start to unload.

But again, we don't know what we don't know, we are just throwing some speculations around and all that matters is the fact that difficulty is staying flat.

[philipma1957]

If you have 5c power and expect the diff and price to be flat for the next 6 months, then that $10,250 miner will profit a bit more than $4000 in the 6 months you'd need to wait for the September batch. So looks like the only way you can rationalize spending the $ to get it now is if you're convinced the price is going to keep going straight up and the diff is going to be flat.

New gear is not shipping out a lot and old gear is breaking.

Latest Block:   672449  (3 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   100.6471%  (1122 / 1114.79 expected, 7.21 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   21434395961348.92
Current Difficulty:   21724134900047.27
Next Difficulty:   between 21843873178625 and 21873384979213
Next Difficulty Change:   between +0.5512% and +0.6870%
Previous Retarget:   February 19, 2021 at 4:56 PM  (+1.3517%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Friday at 2:46 PM  (in 6d 4h 2m 31s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Friday at 3:12 PM  (in 6d 4h 28m 0s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 21h 50m 22s and 13d 22h 15m 52s

and this jump is  looking like the inverse of the last 3
or am I in error
So the  cloud mining group of bitmain & bitfufu & viabtc could have simply reversed my method of hashrate manipulation for this jump.

[mikeywith]

We are almost 1500 blocks into this round and we are lagging, so a negative adjustment is very likely.

Latest Block:   672757  (8 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   98.4372%  (1430 / 1452.70 expected, 22.7 behind)
Next Difficulty Change:   between -1.5328% and -1.4051%
Next Retarget (latest):   Saturday at 5:16 AM  (in 4d 3h 13m 1s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 14d 4h 53m 0s and 14d 5h 20m 3s

This is good news for miners, despite the price drop, back around the end of October we were at a difficulty level of 18.8T and a price of 10k bitcoin, we are now 400% up in terms of price but only 16% up in terms of difficulty.

This means if you used to make 0.1BTC a month you now make 0.084BTC, but instead of that being equal to $1000 it's now worth $4,200, which is 320% more profit, I guess most of us have not witnessed such great times and will probably never will after this.

[philipma1957]

The best is yet to come.  100k in less than 1 year from today and the diff will not untracked itself for at least 8-10 months.

[mikeywith]

The best is yet to come.  100k in less than 1 year from today and the diff will not untracked itself for at least 8-10 months.

Phill are you still holding on to your last year's predictions for the difficulty?  Do you see us go to 35-40T by the end of this year?

While i am not completely against the potential 100k or more theory i highly believe that won't last for long, in all previous cycles we tend to spend the most time at below 50% of the ATH, the last cycle we spent most of the time at about 6-8k before making a new time high, so maybe 40-50k will be the average for the coming years. I need to do more math and chart analysis on this.  

[philipma1957]

chip shortages will slow growth. but when I read articles like this one

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/citi-bitcoin-tipping-point-institutions-115332569.html

price will remain strong.

If and the huge if is the golden asteroids are easily mined for gold. Gold will lose it scarcity value.  There is 11 trillion in gold and 1 trillion in BTC

seems to me wealth will shift towards BTC.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/51858259

gold is far far far better than copper and lead for electrical use so ig that asteroid can be mined at reasonable cost.
gold would be used  for car batteries lasting  100 years or more and for home wiring.

It is a big if but if  I had big wealth and a lot in gold I want to shift it away from gold slowly but surely.

So I see a 10x upside for BTC or 500k in my lifetime (20 years or more ) I would  be 83.  It would be like me to get rich in my eighties.

[mikeywith]

I also do believe that we will eventually hit 500k but that is a very long term target for me, also mining space gold is something I take with a grain of salt as I don't see that happening in the near future, probably not while I am alive, those events are very far away and I don't think they hold much value for now, I am focusing on the current cycle we are in.



Every candle here represents 3 months worth of price data, you see that we spend the majority of time in the lower green area, this is how things have been since 2013 and I see no reason as to why this would change, if you look at the right side of the chart I drew an "imaginary" future candles, those are a replica of the last cycle candles, the chart suggests that in the next 3 months candle we should be in the red zone, with the potential price of as high as 195k before reverting back to our "median" channel with the color green.

The theoretical bottom for the next cycle should be at around 50k and will come at the second half of 2022, but for the entire year and the last quarter of this year the price should be at around 60-80k and we won't make any new ATHs until 2024.

I also believe this analysis model is a bit too optimistic because it doesn't take "diminishing returns" into calculations, so I think of these numbers as the ultimate most optimistic bull scenario.

[alh]

Less than 200 blocks to go in this current epoch: 1816/1841 expected. Projecting a small decline in difficulty.
BTC price: $49,860.

[jbillk]

China’s Inner Mongolia, once a hotbed of bitcoin mining, is now planning to ban all cryptocurrency mining farms and has asked them to shut down operations by the end of next month, forcing miners to move their equipment elsewhere in China or even overseas.

https://forkast.news/inner-mongolia-shut-down-crypto-mining-china-bitcoin-miners/

Looks like we may have a continued drop, at least until all the Mongolian miner find a new home.

[wndsnb]

It seems like every few months there's another "xyz is happening in China so hashrate is going to go down" story, but it never pans out to any noticeable difference.

But I'd guess that if they do shut down all mining in Mongolia, the operations that don't already have a place to move to would just sell their gear. Prices for used gear are stupid high right now. So that gear isn't going to be idle for long.

[philipma1957]

Latest Block:   673421  (5 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   123.6558%  (78 / 63.08 expected, 14.92 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   21724134900047.27
Current Difficulty:   21448277761059.71
Next Difficulty:   between 21782648197713 and 26887195459500
Next Difficulty Change:   between +1.5590% and +25.3583%
Previous Retarget:   Yesterday at 9:19 PM  (-1.2698%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   March 17, 2021 at 6:03 AM  (in 10d 21h 12m 32s)
Next Retarget (latest):   March 19, 2021 at 5:27 PM  (in 13d 8h 36m 33s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 11d 7h 43m 19s and 13d 19h 7m 20s

So diff went side ways with a bit of a drop to 21.4.

Dec 27/2020>> 18,599,593,048,299 - 18.60 T price was $27.0k.

2021-01-09 10:24:37 20,607,418,304,385 - 20.61 T  + 10.79 % $40.3k
2021-01-23 06:56:57 20,823,531,150,111 - 20.82 T   + 1.05 % $32.3k
2021-02-05 21:25:03 21,434,395,961,348 - 21.43 T   + 2.93 % $37.7k
2021-02-19 17:00:36 21,724,134,900,047 - 21.72 T   + 1.35 % $53.8K
2021-03-05 21:28:28 21,448,277,761,059 - 21.45 T   - 1.27 %  $47.5K

from dec 27 2020 to march 5 2021

diff went 18.60t up to 21.35t. or 21.35/18.60= 14.7%

price went  27.0k to 47.5k or  47.5/27.0 = 75.95%

Consider that on 27 Dec 2020 the price of 27,900 was a good price for a miner and profits were good at that point we have greatly improved profits last
71 days.  I got info from 2 sources to make summary above.

Can't quote but sources  used were below

https://btc.com/stats/diff
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=138109.1700

I think we can do well short term as chip shortage is real so gear is not being built.

Consider 10,000 s19 pros at 110th =

10.       x 110th = 1.1gh
100      x 110th = 11gh
1000    x 110th = 111gh
10000  x 11oth = 1.1eh

1.1eh is 1.1/151.86 is only 0.72%  hashrate jump

Also if you are bitmain right now with the ability to self mine and sell gear at the same time you have to weigh do I mine and not sell since selling hurts my mining.

They sold s19pros for 2100 or 2200 at one time. they could sell them for 6200.

so say 1200 cost a profit of 5000 if you sell for 6200 sell enough price may get hurt and diff will go up.
Mine like mad at current profit rate as long as you can then dump gear and bet short on the exchange.

Kind of obvious what their play is especially since they can not get chips anyway.

[mikeywith]

But I'd guess that if they do shut down all mining in Mongolia, the operations that don't already have a place to move to would just sell their gear. Prices for used gear are stupid high right now. So that gear isn't going to be idle for long.

It's inner Mongolia for the record, and you are right about this, the difference overall for this won't be noticeable, one Chinese miner I know told me they would be moving to Sichuan anyway since the rainy season is just a few weeks head, around April is where the hashrate swap happens in China, expect to see some weird ups and down within the same epoch but overall, nothing will happen.

My guess is that the Chinese look after one another's business, they gave miners enough time to reallocate, and asked them to shutdown just at the beginning of the moon soon, this means miners in Inner Mongolia have until September to worry about what to do with their gears, with the super cheap hydropower there, all gears would ROI by then and the only losers will be those buying the gears at the peak of the cycle.

[alh]

We are now a bit past the half way point in this epoch. We are currently ahead some (1063/1039 expected) in terms of the blocks mined. At the present rate cryptothis.com projects that we'll finish the epoch with a difficulty increase of about +2%. BTC price is still pretty high at $56,795.

Edit: A few hours later, BTC price has now risen to a new high of $61,000!

Every time I looked at this over the last week the price has been good, and we have been ahead by 10-25 blocks. No crazy spikes in the block solve rate.  I don't think I even seen it behind during the last 7 days for what it's worth.

[philipma1957]

I have a new speculation theory as to why bitcoin hash rate is not higher.

Unfortunately it involves eth and eth mining here goes.

If you are bitmain and now have 3 huge contracts for cloud mining started this year.  you have x megawatts.

you look at $$$ per watt.

a s19 pro does 110 th at 40 cents uses 3300 watts or 80 kwatts at 5 cents.

this is 44 usd at 4 dollars power net 40.

an eth asic miner does 2700 mh at 3300 watts.

that is 270 usd and the same 4 dollars in power or 266 net.

eth hash rate grows like a motherfucker.

BTC hash rate grows slow.

eth prices kept down as you need to sell all the eth to get the btc to pay the btc cloud contracts.

we know bitmain can make an eth miner
we know bitmain can make a btc miner.

by doing the above they generate 270 usd worth of btc for 4 dollars power.

they keep btc hash rate down.
they please all btc cloud contracts.
they raise btc price as they buy btc with the eth they mine
they raise eth hash rate like mad
this also lower eth price.

everything above they can do
no one checks their cloud mining.

I like it and in fact hope they are doing it as I do not like eth much.

I really would like this to stay here as if true it is directly improving btc  price with out more HASHRATE INCREASING.

[mikeywith]

Phill, while your theory does not take away from the fact that bitmain is facing chips shortage just like everyone else, it does make a lot of sense as to why would they do something similar, but the way I see it, it has a very small impact on what's actually going on.

Latest Block:   674507  (14 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   101.3821%  (1164 / 1148.13 expected, 15.87 ahead)
Next Difficulty Change:   between +1.1943% and +1.4578%

Going with the assumption that we are getting a 1.5% increase and in simple plain math that is 2.3EH, or 20,900 S19 pros, that is still a HUGE amount of hashrate added to the network, of course assuming that all other old gears are already online and hashing which is more likely than not at current prices, I don't think we can do a lot more than 20k S19 pro in two weeks or say 10k per week, in the best (or worst depending on how you want to view it   ) case scenario we would do say 30k S19s pro a week? that's still a tiny amount against the total existing hashrate.

On the other hand, the massive increase in ETH hashrate is due to the fact that it's a GPU coin that was hit by a massive wave of ASIC gears, a single A10 Pro does 750MH, back when this gear was released ETH hashrate was at 250T, which means 20k gears of the like of A10 pros makes 15%, so 20K S19 pro push BTC 2-3% while 20K A10 pro push ETH 15%, add to that the fact the many gamers and hobby miners own GPUs and after the recent spike in price, most started mining, it's assumed that there are over 3 BILLION pc gamers out there, so if 1% of them switch their GPUs to mining and say they own an average GPU of 30mh/s that puts them at 300 terahash which is 75% of the current hashrate.

I don't want to go into more details, but the point here is that it's pretty easy to move GPU-based coins up, while it's harder by a few orders of magnitude to move a huge coin like BTC.

As for the price theory, 99% of other coins are barely above their ATH, nothing so strange about ETH, BTC is probably the only coin that is up 200% from the 2017 highs.

Back to the difficulty prediction, hydropower season is on its way, I expect to see slightly larger jumps than the once we had so far this year,  at 1-2 cents every single gear in China will be overclocked to its max sucking every bit of bitcoin they can before the season is over.