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

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Since Phil has not started one yet for this year guess I will
Damn 2021 has started with a bang!
=
For a while, skyrocketing exchange rate despite falling diff. Whoda thunk it?
Finally looks like hash rate is picking up as older miners go back online and newer gear is throttled up to full speed along with newest gear finally starting to come online.

One very interesting development is the US gov looking into restrictions on private wallets. Well not restrictions per se, more like tagging tx's to/from them for further scrutiny. Couple that with at least 1 huge mining group throwing their hash behind censored transactions and miners in the USA will be more monitored than ever.

Methinks 2021 is going to be very interesting  
Now in true Blockchain fashion, time to see if this gets 'validated' or orphaned..
For completeness:
here is Phil's 2020 thread
and his 2019 thread

Edit: local rules - no trolling, no cloud mining ads, no unicorn 500TH mining gears buy links, no off-topic (non-BTC) clickbait, etc. Such posts WILL be deleted by me!

  While I'm allowing a wide range of discussion here it must at least be related to things that affect Bitcoin mining difficulty such as new hardware, current events, phase of the moon, etc. While *some* discussion of alts in relation to their effect on BTC diff will be allowed, crap coin discussion must be kept to a minimum. Continued hammering on alts vs BTC is right-out.

  Unaccompanied children found here will be given a large 'duba' of espresso, candy and a puppy before being returned to their parents.

[mikeywith]

Was waiting for phill to fire up the 2021 topic since this has always been his idea, anyway if he is fine with you doing it, I hope he closes the other 2020 topic so we can shift the discussion here.

Would be good if you add in some local rules, no trolling, no cloud mining ads, no unicorn 500TH mining gears buy links, and all of the stuff that most of us wouldn't want to see in this thread.

with that being said, let me the first to post the current difficulty status

Current Pace:   110.6662%  (1418 / 1281.33 expected, 136.67 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   18670168558399.59
Current Difficulty:   18599593048299.49
Next Difficulty:   between 20393787297446 and 20585365081562
Next Difficulty Change:   between +9.6464% and +10.6764%
Previous Retarget:   December 28, 2020 at 2:01 AM  (-0.3780%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Saturday at 5:38 PM  (in 3d 18h 3m 38s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Saturday at 8:29 PM  (in 3d 20h 54m 36s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 12d 15h 36m 56s and 12d 18h 27m 54s

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Done. Added local rules to OP for this thread.
Damn! +10% projected diff increase, wonder why it took so long?

[HagssFIN]

The lead times with Bitmain, Canaan and MicroBT gear are getting quite long now again. I think mostly because of the small production capacity for chips and the huge demand.

I was surprised when Blokforge announced that they have an A1246 batch available with quite quick delivery schedule (January 2021).
https://blokforge.com/product/canaan-avalon-1246-90-th-s-bitcoin-miner-w-psu/

In the completely opposite side it was ridicculous to see Bitmain announcing a S19 batch, with delivery schedule in August 2021.

[philipma1957]

Cool someone else can do it this year.

Good I have been so freaking stressed from my wife being ill for an entire year with covid-19 and the damage it did to her running 1 less thread will be a nice break for me.

First off.  I am a third tier guy.

1st tier guys have been loaded from btc for a long time.
2 nd tier guys made their money in 2017

3rd tier guys are going to have a very good year in 2021.

At least I hope I will.

Well we see this big jump 8-11% due in 4 days or so.  What matters are the next two jumps.

2 big jumps of 10% after this jump of 10%  would mean a lot of chips are in hand.

Smaller jumps would mean mikeywith will be correct.  and we just won't get the big diff runup.

As for price.  every day over 30k is good and last I looked we are over 34 k.

I really thought we would correct in the 26-30k range.  we have not really done so. Now I am not sure when we drop back.

Or what we go up to. 70-80k with a diff of 20.0 would make us equal to 2017 mining profits.

blocks were 2x and gear was 2x more power hungry so a factor of 4x  and 80/20 = 4x   so 16x

diff is 15 times higher  so 15x  

Since mining got that hot once before. it could do it again.  so to think we end up at 70-80k with a diff around 20-22 is possible.

[Searing]

Well, as an aside, I'd bet my own $$$ that Bitmain will 'stall' on their orders for BTC equipment coming out March of 2021 for 'mysterious' reasons. er...we are not filling our data halls first! (Seen this in when was this 2016? Had the rep from Eastshore.xyz call us practically in 'tears' telling us they stopped the truck that was loaded when LTC pumped 'unexpectedly' for a Firmware update from 1/2016 (think it was that year of LTC pump) actually yanked the www.eastshore.xyz orders with our L3's on such after the sale! On supposed 'firmware glitch on 1/2016 firmware! (They lied) Needless to say, we got our miners, 4 months late...and you guessed it still had Jan 2016 firmware! Gasp! I'm just putting it out there, I see a repeat of these games again for BTC/LTC or any other equipment they may have promised in like in 2016 or so.

Anyway, what came to mind with the article: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-asic-mining-shortage-bitmain-sold-out. I see a 3-peat on this...rinse/wash/repeat. This time with BTC equipment per se.

By the By ....the BTC spent on these pre-orders ...really, really have to hurt...what people buy these at $14K BTC? Gasp! Current ATH today so far I saw on www.coinmarketcap.com was $35,495.95...I mean, can this not worsen? I mean will ANYBODY pre-order ANY BTC/Crypto equipment with this FOMO pumping? Things are gonna get tighter/tighter/BTC availability wise? IMHO.

Anyway, the article above 'set me off' to years past. Again, I see 'delays', ahem, per the fill-up of their own data halls. Then again, maybe I'm wrong, even Bitmain may think a better use of HODL'ing coin than expansion at this time for more equipment also.

FOMO times indeed!

Brad

[mikeywith]

Smaller jumps would mean mikeywith will be correct.  and we just won't get the big diff runup.

As for price.  every day over 30k is good and last I looked we are over 34 k.

This time I am almost certain phill,  . You see,  I wouldn't make price predictions because that requires a crystal ball for me to be pretty sure, but as far as the difficulty goes, it needs magic to do 3x or 4x or even 2x.

I can't stress this enough but the world is facing a semiconductors shortage, TSMC dropped its discount policy, some chips have gone 30% in price this month, to see huge spikes in difficulty Bitmain needs to make over a million S19, oh well good luck with that.

It really doesn't matter if we see a 10-15% spike for this epoch or even the next one, we will eventually slow down and start going up with small spikes, I am more worried about old and current gears being overclocked due to the overwhelming profit rather than new gears coming in, but say we get a 30% icnrease from everyone's gears going on full blast, that will be about 40EH, new gears will hardly go to 60-70E? that's not even 100% of the current hashrate.

I might be very optimistic as far as difficulty goes, but for everybody's sake, let's hope that we will look back to this topic 10 months later, and say well -- Mikey was right.

[philipma1957]

We have a s19pro due to ship this month.

Paid with 14k coin.

So the 2500 paid would now be 6250usd.

and it is subject to trump tax of 700-800

so this s19pro will cost 7050 usd.

but on paper/tax records it cost 3250. ugh.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Well now - was at the Canaan.io site looking for info on chips used in the A12xx series and came across their new offering of a miner designed for flowing tank immersion. https://canaan.io/product/avalon-immersion-cooling-miner

Info on the A12 chips has been removed but late last year I recall seeing them being on TSMC's 14/12nm node. Certainly not cutting edge but the plus side is that there is a lot of Foundry production capacity for chips above 10nm so Canaan should have no chip sourcing problems.

Bitmain on the other hand - because all new chips used for the latest phones and such have moved to the <7nm nodes they are hurting. Apple & other phone makers, AMD, NVIDIA, Cisco and other firms have bought up all of 2021 production capacity. If BM did not reserve enough capacity they are screwed...

Back to that Canaan tank miner: I really like that idea vs using cooling plates like BM chose to do. Perhaps not as elegant but far fewer cooling connections to worry about. Cannan has a video on it here

@Phil, Ja. That is the biggest killer about BM pushing delivery out to 6+ months and may partly be why they are currently only accepting payment in fiat: If folks were able to pay in BTC right now, just like you when gear is finally delivered that coin may be worth 2x or more the value when you paid. People would bitch up a storm about that so forcing payment in fiat eliminates that complaint point.

[stompix]

... at least 1 huge mining group throwing their hash behind censored transactions.

Whaaaaat???!!!!!!! No, not about the morons and their idea of censorship, which is "old" news but..

As a founding member of DCMNA and one of North America’s largest enterprise Bitcoin mining companies, Marathon will put all of its mining hashrate (equivalent to 10.36 EH/s, or 7.6% of the total Bitcoin network’s hashrate, if all miners were deployed today at current levels) into the pool.

So they've just bought 100k miners? Will Bitmain be able to make those with all the shortages? And how much premium they paid..and too many questions...

Back to the current difficulty, and the jump, although I see it as a possibility I don't buy the low power theory in total, and the only reason is why suddenly. Yeah, the price spiked, but from 17k to 24k nobody switched them on, and suddenly for just another 15% increase 30Exahash of gear is suddenly profitable to mine in full mode? Yeah. I've done the math from 2 to 8 cents but to me! it doesn't make sense. A few extra exahash yeah, but 13-15, or god knows how much it will be at the end of this epoch? Nope!

I can't stress this enough but the world is facing a semiconductors shortage, TSMC dropped its discount policy, some chips have gone 30% in price this month, to see huge spikes in difficulty Bitmain needs to make over a million S19, oh well good luck with that.

Always wondered, how much would that 1 million mean in terms of days at TMSC full capacity?  No idea how to approximate it.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

So they've just bought 100k miners?

No, the Coindesk article said they will have a total of 100k miners when they are delivered so the 100k includes older miners (s17's?) they already have. The sidebar link about Marathon group states that they have 'only' 21.5k of the S19 Pro's on order. Still one frickin' huge number of chips though.

Always wondered, how much would that 1 million mean in terms of days at TMSC full capacity?  No idea how to approximate it.

For a start, how many chips are in the S19 and what are the dimension of the chip package itself?

We can safely assume the 7-5nm nodes are being produced on 12" wafers and the actual dimensions of Silicon inside a chip is usually around 50 to 80% of final package size. How many mm square are the chips they use? There are stitching losses when fitting square patterns on a round wafer plus each wafer also contains alignment and witness areas so those have to be accounted for as well. Playing with those numbers will give a good idea of how many chips are on a wafer.

Final factor is a rule of thumb value: It takes around 30 days for wafers to go through the production systems. Once the production pipeline is full with any one device, no idea how many wafers/hr are ran though I seem to recall discussions of an EUV lithography throughput of 150 wafers/hr per-stepper as a target mid last year.

edit: found a wafer yield calculator There are others, just Google "Wafer yield calculator". Typical street width (scribe lines) to use is 10 mil (0.254mm) and use a wafer diameter of 12" (300mm). Beyond that we need the chip size so anyone have the dimensions of a S17 chip? Odds are the s19's will be same physical chip size.

[mikeywith]

Always wondered, how much would that 1 million mean in terms of days at TMSC full capacity?  No idea how to approximate it.

I am not electronic savvy but I can tell you that 1M gears are way beyond BM capacity, even if they weren't limited by semiconductor shortage, they are out of stock till August and they don't even have half a million gear in order if you combine all the large orders since most of them are public and multiply that by 2 you will still be below the 200k miners if they were remotely close to making that much in a year or two then things would have been different.

so anyone have the dimensions of a S17 chip? Odds are the s19's will be same physical chip size.

I have seen and held S17 chip in my hand, I have a few of them lying around at the farm which I can't access now, they are slightly bigger than the S9 chips of which I happen to know their exact size which is 8mm*8mm, I measured that with a regular ruler so expect 1-5% variance ( my eyes are bad), the S19 chips might be 10mm or 12mm, I think you can safely do the math with these numbers and in the coming days, I'll get you the exact dimension.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Using the wafer yield calculator here and using 12" wafer, a 10mm chip size with die size of 8x8mm and zero defects it comes up with a max of 904 chips per wafer. With default values for defects, 848 good dies per wafer.

That is not very many for using such a high cost node size... AND that is assuming 93.83% yield which I highly doubt is being achieved.

[philipma1957]

Using the wafer yield calculator and using 12" wafer, a 10mm chip size with die size of 8x8mm and zero defects is comes up with a max of 904 chips per wafer. With default values for defects, 848 good dies per wafer.

That is not very many for using such a high cost node size... AND that is assuming 93.83% yield which I highly doubt is being achieved.

Lets further that number just a bit. How many chips for a s19pro?   210?

Lastly what does a 12 inch wafer cost to burn?

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Cost to make a wafer is a lot harder to pin down.
For us outsiders who are not TSMC customers I doubt we can get any hard numbers, just (wildly) guess. The only 'real' numbers that I've seen bandied about is that the photolithography masks for 5nm node cost around 1.5 million USD each and typical lifetime for them is maybe 50k wafers - probably less - and that is hoping/praying that nothing happens to them before expected EOL.

Chips have several layers to them, anywhere from 3 to 7 or more and each uses a different mask. Since mining ASIC's are very simple circuits there should be only a few layers to them. Then there is the cost of the EUV lightsource from ASML/Cymer, which in 2017 was around 500 million each (I'll look up where I got that from to verify). Speaking of which - good article about that from 2017 here. That article also pegs throughput at 100 wafers/hr but again that was from 2017. Though it is from 2016, another good one is here. I know there has been a few significant improvements since then so for current rates I'll stick to the 150 wafers/hr I gave earlier.

No matter what, all I come up with is that it is an insanely high cost process that is not really suited for making what needs to be 'cheap' chips...

[wndsnb]

Using the wafer yield calculator here and using 12" wafer, a 10mm chip size with die size of 8x8mm and zero defects it comes up with a max of 904 chips per wafer. With default values for defects, 848 good dies per wafer.

That is not very many for using such a high cost node size... AND that is assuming 93.83% yield which I highly doubt is being achieved.

I'd be surprised if the die is actually that big ... on a 7nm node that's a lot of transistors. A 14nm node 6 core i7 is about 12x12mm.

I have a bunch of dead S17 chips, I'll see if I can grind one down to expose the die.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

I have a bunch of dead S17 chips, I'll see if I can grind one down to expose the die.

Please do! I was going to ask if anyone could do that as a quick & dirty way to find out. If you have access to nitric acid and proper PPE a good breakdown of non-destructive decapping of IC's is here. There are others as well, just do a search using "Decapping IC's".

[philipma1957]

In the mean time btc is knocking on 40k!

39.6k about 20 minutes ago on coinbase.

Latest Block:   664993  (7 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   112.3884%  (1730 / 1539.30 expected, 190.7 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   18670168558399.59
Current Difficulty:   18599593048299.49
Next Difficulty:   between 20853370844478 and 20905400000286
Next Difficulty Change:   between +12.1174% and +12.3971%
Previous Retarget:   December 27, 2020 at 7:01 PM  (-0.3780%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Saturday at 5:59 AM  (in 1d 18h 24m 44s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Saturday at 6:43 AM  (in 1d 19h 9m 28s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 12d 10h 57m 47s and 12d 11h 42m 30s

the 12% maybe 13% jump. does not touch the price increase.

Logically speaking a lot of USA people with money are afraid of the election fight.

So if Biden is sworn in on Jan 20th the flood of assets to btc may stem.

$729,741,315,618. = BTC value.  It would be easy to shift 1 trillion to that. Due to fear of a USA disaster.  So 1.7/.7 = a 2.42 factor

so 2.42 x 39.6 = 96k is possible it the election unrest still flows on.

I sold a piece of btc today.

I will sell more if we go over 40k

please note I got the 729+ billion number directly from here

https://coinmarketcap.com

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Ja, insanity ^^ all around!
In other news, just sent a wire transfer to my mortgage company to pay off my house using coin I cashed out at $25k late December
And no I do not regret selling at that price. Even though would have been nice to exchange at higher pricing, whoda ever thunk it would continue to skyrocket like it has! When I setup the trade in early Dec with BTC banging around $15-16k, $25k seemed like a good *maybe* target to trigger the sale at.

I would have loved to sell higher but it is what it is and I can live with that. No matter what I still have a tidy sum of BTC left for a retirement nest egg plus no more mortgage to pay off

[wndsnb]

So, for the s17 chip (bm1397AD), package dimensions are 8x8 mm, die looks like about 5mm x 5mm. Still seems like a lot of wafer real estate for a chip you can buy for $6. S19 chips are going for about $25.