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

[mikeywith]

I expected three 10% jumps in a row. But quite a few people  made a case for that not happening.

It looks like you are going to be right, after all, I think I underestimated the amount of hash power that has been sitting on the sidelines waiting to be fired, it just didn't make that sense that why not when bitcoin was 25k, why to wait for 30k, there is something missing in the equation here, I don't know if it was large quantities of mining gears in the middle of the ocean waiting to arrive at their destination and thus they couldn't come online at x price but wait till y price despite the fact that they could have come online when the price was at x! or was it something else? we don't know now, and probably never.

there is also another point which I seem to have missed, this section of the form was a bit quiet a month ago, look at it now, many newbies coming in asking what's wrong with their S9s and the other old gears, I see the same questions every hour on other platforms, it seems like many more people than I thought have not sold their old gears and they stored them in the basement waiting for prices to rebound. Since I think I follow rational thoughts (of which most turn out to be irrational: ) I assumed that the vast majority of gears were already sold, up and running, or simply dead, but no, Joe and his grandma kept their mining gears which they bought at the peak of 2017 despite my "rational recommendation".

my uncle pete died at 93.  he was the oldest male on either side of my family.

So I will be 64 this Jan 2021.

This gives me 29 or less years.

Phill, I wish you a happy and a prolonged life, one with lots of happines and a ton of effienct mining gears.

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[philipma1957]

Thank you for the wish.

Oh our 1 s19pro came yesterday.

It is huge taller wider deeper.  it is doing 111th. my guess is that I am not the only one that got the Jan batch this week.

[thierry4wd]

Picture !!! review !!!!! 

[alh]

Bitcoin never fails to disappoint in terms of price for 2021. Just this week alone I've seen it range from $32k to just under $40K.

The FOMO on price as awakened my Avalon 841 from it's year long slumber. Damn the electricity, full speed ahead.....

[philipma1957]

Picture !!! review !!!!! 

Maybe some photos it is at buysolar's house.

[alh]

Less than 5 days out, and it looks like the difficulty will increase, though less than 4% if the current rate holds.

Current BTC price: $35701

[philipma1957]

It backed off a lot.

Latest Block:   666672  (4 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   103.3547%  (1393 / 1347.79 expected, 45.21 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   18599593048299.49
Current Difficulty:   20607418304385.63
Next Difficulty:   between 21239855556434 and 21308901872558
Next Difficulty Change:   between +3.0690% and +3.4040%
Previous Retarget:   January 9, 2021 at 10:18 AM  (+10.7950%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Friday at 11:23 PM  (in 4d 4h 27m 47s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Saturday at 12:26 AM  (in 4d 5h 30m 16s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 13h 5m 38s and 13d 14h 8m 8s

and we have 623 blocks to go maybe it slows more.

[mikeywith]

Current difficulty status

Current Pace:   103.3561%  (1406 / 1360.35 expected, 45.65 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   18599593048299.49
Current Difficulty:   20607418304385.63
Next Difficulty:   between 21242876570946 and 21309099467267
Next Difficulty Change:   between +3.0836% and +3.4050%
Previous Retarget:   January 9, 2021 at 5:18 PM  (+10.7950%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Saturday at 6:23 AM  (in 4d 2h 21m 55s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Saturday at 7:23 AM  (in 4d 3h 21m 51s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 13h 5m 22s and 13d 14h 5m 18s

I wonder what changed from 40k to 36k, that's only a 10% drop, and bitcoin price didn't hold that 40k for long, so I don't think many people entered based only on the price of 40k, if they entered then, why leave now? unless their profitability was just a couple cents that got wiped out with a relatively very tiny drop in price.

[philipma1957]

Dropped again. price is still over 32K.

Latest Block:   667027  (a minute ago)
Current Pace:   101.6037%  (1748 / 1720.41 expected, 27.59 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   18599593048299.49
Current Difficulty:   20607418304385.63
Next Difficulty:   between 20939663844171 and 20945739082533
Next Difficulty Change:   between +1.6123% and +1.6417%
Previous Retarget:   January 9, 2021 at 10:18 AM  (+10.7950%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Saturday at 4:59 AM  (in 1d 19h 57m 41s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Saturday at 5:05 AM  (in 1d 20h 3m 19s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 18h 41m 47s and 13d 18h 47m 24s

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Exchange now below $30k. Bet some of the barely profitable older gear that were recently brought online will be shutting down...

[garetjax]

I bet a lot of its due to Janet Yellen's comments on crypto

https://markets.businessinsider.com/currencies/news/bitcoin-price-cryptocurrency-should-be-curtailed-terrorism-concerns-yellen-2021-1-1029985692

Janet Yellen on Tuesday suggested lawmakers "curtail" the use of Bitcoin amid terrorism concerns.
Yellen said cryptocurrency transactions were used "mainly for illicit financing."
It was the latest sign that lawmakers and regulators could get tough on Bitcoin and Ethereum.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Yeah right. Idiots. Surprised she didn't mention 'save the exploited children!' as part of the FUD
Unlike Fiat, Bitcoin transactions are all recorded in an open public ledger making it fairly easy to track tx's as coins are moved around. Now who owns those addresses is a bit harder but at some point the crypto coins are exchanged into fiat. Existing kyc/aml regs cover tracking that.

[mikeywith]

I bet a lot of its due to Janet Yellen's comments on crypto...

There go the "whys" of why we dropped, is it Janet or is it the Bitmex double-spend fud? if I had to agree on one of these it would be the chain split that was reported by Bitmex, many people thought someone "cracked bitcoin", I am sure even some large investors don't understand how bitcoin works and they probably bought that.

But using common sense, I am leaning more towards the fact that the drop is nothing but the result of a 13-week rally that had 0 corrections, we are far from all the moving averages in the world, and since 2010 bitcoin always dips 30-40% after it rallies 100-300%, nothing out of the ordinary is happening.

Exchange now below $30k. Bet some of the barely profitable older gear that were recently brought online will be shutting down...

Some of them paid $400 for an old S9, I feel bad for them, but well, they have at least learned something.

Current Pace:   101.7387%  (1833 / 1801.67 expected, 31.33 ahead)
Next Difficulty Change:   between +1.7602% and +1.7751%
Previous Retarget:   January 9, 2021 at 5:18 PM  (+10.7950%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Tomorrow at 11:33 AM  (in 1d 5h 58m 43s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Tomorrow at 11:36 AM  (in 1d 6h 1m 33s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 18h 15m 27s and 13d 18h 18m 17s

Down from 10% to 1%, sorry phill, seems like I was right this time  , I suppose this is something that should make you more satisfied than being right about your prediction anyway.

[philipma1957]

I prefer lower diff more than anything. price will bounce again.

I think a lot of scared just in case money has been pulled from BTC since the revolution and Trump coup failed.

Now that USA appears to have avoided a second civil war. Many people may have pulled coin out of BTC.

[stompix]

There go the "whys" of why we dropped, is it Janet or is it the Bitmex double-spend fud? if I had to agree on one of these it would be the chain split that was reported by Bitmex, many people thought someone "cracked bitcoin", I am sure even some large investors don't understand how bitcoin works and they probably bought that.

I'm going with the awesome trio Yellen, Lagarde, and Gensler, from the two options, investors that have come to bitcoin are more used to stocks and funds they pay more attention to regulators than to something technically that probably not even the majority of this forum has a clue what it is, proof being the ridiculous topics that appeared. But far more likely is just people taking profits, a lot bought way cheaper and probably don't have the nerves or patience to wait for more, or scared that a new correction will happen.

Funny how the projected difficulty keeps getting is going down also, if we had one or two more days we might have gone close to 0. No new gear coming up, no new gear being announced, at least the price is going up and down like a carousel,as things are getting boring  

Some of them paid $400 for an old S9, I feel bad for them, but well, they have at least learned something.

At least that guy got something, the scam section is full of newbies getting tricked by fake ads, one &^* scammer even used my name on a fake page for a fake review. Same with could mining, scammers are on a rampage, and looking at the sums it's possible they are making more than real miners.

[philipma1957]

we did about 1% pretty good pick by mikeywith

[spoonbandits]

using a 300mm wafer with 5x5mm die w/0.25mm scribe lines & default edge loss and excellent 97% good yield produces 2,248 usable dies per that yield calculator.

Given the still short good-enough-for-production age of 7-5nm tech and increasing defect rate to 5 per sqcm still gives 88% yield and 2,017 usable chips per wafer. Not bad but do remember that calculator and most others do not predict speed performance which can vary quite widely. The calculators only account for hard faults.

Regarding how much real estate the chip has: Like gpu chips that is because they DO contain a massive amount of transistors used as cores. Unlike gpu's, mining ASIC cores are far more simple as they cannot be programmed on-the-fly - that translates into fewer connections to now unneeded different intermediate circuits. Space needed by intermediated circuits now goes to more identical cores so just a few litho masks needed to create and connect the logic circuits. For some reason for the T15 chips, 256 cores per chip rings a bell... Odds are the s17 & 19 pack in even more. Good part about that is that a chip can have many dead cores from a hard defect but the chip is still usable, just lower number of cores cycling per clock.

End result is why I can see the chips being what I consider amazingly inexpensive. I can also see why TSMC and other Foundries have now given the <7nm mining chips a lower priority over much more complex and ergo higher value chips. Not exactly fair considering that from what I've seen, since around start of the 16nm node miner chips have been rather excellent mass-production testbeds for the Foundries. Yeah, Apple et al paid for the research to do it but making the simple and very fault tolerant miner chips gave TSMC and Samsung the expertise to use those nodes to produce chips en-masse.

That said, there is still very limited production capacity for chips using the still at cutting edge <7nm nodes. That will not change for several years. Only 1 company makes the EUV stepper/scanners used for the photolithography and they are very massive and complex beasts that cannot be mass produced. The handfull of foundries that can produce the chips - Intel, TSMC, Samsung, and Global all need them. I'll have to find the article but as I recall they can make only a couple dozen per year,

Awesome post, thank you. Been trying to dig up info on the process as a newbie and this was super informative.

A question i posed in another thread: I get that these manufacturers are based in China, but do any of the US based foundries have this type of tech? I recall TI having capabilities for ~20nm in Texas but thats as far as I got with my research. I was using this list and then cross referencing the company websites:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_semiconductor_fabrication_plants

*EDIT - Scratch that, looks like Intel in the Pacific Northwest is the only place with that type of capability.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

The chip foundries used are NOT in China! China has zero cutting/bleeding edge foundries and it will be many years before the lithography technology needed for 10nm and lower nodes is sold there.

TSMC is In Taiwan and of course Samsung is in Korea. Yes Intel has foundries that could be used but their best tech is reserved for their own usage. Sidebar to that, Intel has always used a different definition for what a node-size is: Intel refers to the metal layers vs the gate size. Technically, Intel's 10nm node is equivalent to about TSMC/Samsung 7nm nodes.

Back to foundries in the US, Global Foundries operates a 7 & 5nm foundry in upstate New York.

[spoonbandits]

Interesting! Tangentially, what do you make of this?
https://www.zdnet.com/article/korean-researchers-develop-ternary-semiconductor-tech/
https://bizwhiznetwork.com/samsung-backed-researchers-debut-ternary-semiconductor-design/

Samsung put a ton of money into this group. Interest in ternary seems to be making a resurgence, and I'm keeping an eye on any developments. I think we're still some time away from production at scale, but this could be a major shift in ASIC mining? Ternary seems to have been collecting dust since the late 80s. I'm also not sure how you would reflect the bitwise operators of the SHA2 compress into trits.

[criptix]

[...]

There are several producers of EUVL equipment. Though ASML (dutch company) produces super majority of the machines. They make around 50 machines per year. Majority of the machines are sold to tsmc and samsung for their 5 nm chip production.


Btw. why was the production cost question reported and deleted? I could also rephrase and ask how the production cost for BTC could develop in the next 6 months. (Production cost is directly connected to mining diff.)