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

[philipma1957]

Taking the 1/2ing into account would make 2020-2021 15.5T to 42.8T = 176%.

In the 1st quarter of 2019, Bitmain had a revenue of >$1 billion. At $2500 a miner, that would be 400,000 miners in a single quarter. So between all the manufacturers, I don't think it is that far-fetched to think we're going to hit another 100% increase.

No we may not ever do a 100% year again as  the s17pro set to low hash rate of 39th can do 25 watts a th.
The s19pro has not be proven to do better than 29 watts a th.  Yeah I think it can but there may be a flat line limit with efficiency  and that makes 100% diff jumps harder to do.

Best I can compare this to is a gasoline engine. A gallon of gas can only do so much work. Eventually it reaches a limit as to how many miles per gallon you can get from 1 gallon.

We did 1gh and 400 watts with gpus
We did 1gh and 15 watts with asic usb sticks.
We did 1 gh and 2 watts with s-1 miner
we did 1th and 1600 watts with 2 s-3 miners
We did 1 th and 1100 watts with 1 s-5 miner
we did 1 th and 250 watts on the s-7
we did 1 th and 80 watts on the s-9
we did 1 th and 60 watts on the s-15
we did 1 th and 25 watts on the s-17pro best settings
we do 1 th 29 watts  on the s19 pro  so size is better but not wats per th this will slow us up a lot.

We may be reaching the limits for watts per th.

[mikeywith]

Taking the 1/2ing into account would make 2020-2021 15.5T to 42.8T = 176%.

I have not had enough sleep for days, but I don't think my math is that bad, 15.5 to 21.4 means we had a 5.9 hashrate increment, if not for the halving we would (in theory) have had double that which is 11.8, so 15.5T + 11.8T = 27.3T  or 76%. I think your mistake was multiplying the total difficulty of 21.4 by 2 to make up for the halving, keep in mind that 15.5T of that is the old difficulty which has nothing to do with the theoretical new difficulty, do I make any sense?

In the 1st quarter of 2019, Bitmain had a revenue of >$1 billion. At $2500 a miner, that would be 400,000 miners in a single quarter.

IIRC Q1 2019 was when bitmain got rid of all the S9s they had, the majority of them must have been made prior to that, I highly doubt they made 400,000 in 3 months, also, it was probably easier to make those S9s compared to the S19, seeing that a whale like RIOT blockchain has to wait until October 2021 for a relatively small order of 37,000 miners to be fully delivered suggests that Bitmain is nowhere near making half a million miners in 2021, but well, as you say, they will want to make it work and they could find a way.

So between all the manufacturers, I don't think it is that far-fetched to think we're going to hit another 100% increase.

Given the current situation, I would be very surprised if we hit 40T by Feb 2022, however, this is the lowest number one should expect just to be on the reasonable safe side.

3) 100% increase for the next year and 100% for the next one.
Does this sound logical?
I understand that this I very generic way to do it with many assumptions.

If I was going to buy a mining gear tomorrow, I'd just assume that we will at least hit a 100% difficulty increment every year, bitcoin price will not go past its current levels and my gears will die in 12 months, and then I'll run the numbers based on that, so if, with the assumption that my new miner will make half the profit it makes now and can't ROI before the end of the year, I won't be buying that gear.

[wndsnb]

The instant after the halving, it suddenly took 2X the work to mine the same amount of BTC. So if the purpose of the comparison is in relation to profitability, then I think multiplying the post halving difficulty by 2, or dividing the pre-halving difficulty by 2, is correct.

But in terms of using diff to estimate hashrate, there is no correction. The block reward amount does not come into the equation for diff correction, so 21.4T before or after the halving still produces the same estimated network hashrate.

As far as the ability to produce insane amounts of miners quickly, I don't think it would be as hard as you think for them to ramp up. And with this extended time of high profitability, they have plenty of time to secure contracts with all those giant >100MW farms, and expand their manufacturing capacity if required. They can't deliver those 37k miners until October because they have to wait for the chips.

The flip side of this, maybe Bitmain decides not to expand production even though demand is sky high, and then sell fewer miners at a much higher price point. Just seems like in the past, they do the opposite, and sell a ton of gear at prices low enough to try to really hurt their competition.

[philipma1957]

We have reached a point of gear not getting more efficient.

S19pro has 1 speed setting uses 29 watts a th
S17pro has many settings and the vnish set to 39th  gets 25 watts a th.
That is a road block to hashrate growth also missing chips will slow rate.

In order to increase hash rate you need more power infrastructure.
Mining won't build a new dam as it is costly.
Mining can be leveraged to grow solar arrays.
I am thinking the next stage will be more solar arrays which were funded by mining.
If so we can have strong growth since a mining farm can say we help the environment as we increase solar footprint and lower carbon footprint
This is going to happen slowly but surely maybe this bull run will be the one that sparks this type of investment off. If so then we can have large hashrate growth as it would be decreasing carbon fuel burning.

 I am not a tree hugger anti coal/gas/oil. guy I look at this from a practical viewpoint. I have seen and help build profitable solar arrays. That would scale 10x even 100x the 125k-watt field we run.

If global warming is real then this is the way to go.
If global warming is fake and the sun is simply a bit hotter then this is the way to go.
Why is that?
Sun will cool and the cheap solar power will reduce and like short sighted morons we have been buying all the coal the gas and the oil.

So either way solar is smart and carbo is stupid as fuck.
We could continue mining coal and storing it just in case the suns drops it's output. And we could be building cleaner coal plants just in case we need to switch back to them.
Oil and gas can stay in the ground for now.

Of course this would piss off gas and oil guys but they had a good run.

Also they purchased tons of solar tech so I am only telling you what will happen in 20 or 30 years from now.

All this relates to mining diff since mining will not grow without power. (40,000x the power for a gpu to a s17pro) Those power savings will not happen again.  Maybe just maybe 10 watts a th is the best we will ever see.

[MZ4]

I am not an expert on solar panels but with some friends that we have researched on that, the problem is that you need power 24/365 per day and solar can not give it you. You need batteries to be able to store energy and have a much bigger solar panel installation to do so. That is why everyone goes near geothermal energy or hydroelectric because this can be constant supply.

[mikeywith]

But in terms of using diff to estimate hashrate, there is no correction. The block reward amount does not come into the equation for diff correction...

Difficulty increases by 10% because of the halving, if not for the halving it would in theory increase by 20%, I think this is getting complicated when it's really simple, and since it isn't a crucial point maybe we should just leave it that way.

They can't deliver those 37k miners until October because they have to wait for the chips.

This is one of the main reasons I base my theory on, so if they can't secure enough chips for 37,000 miners until October, what are the odds that they will be able to get enough chips for 500,000- 1,000,000 miners? even if TMSC pushes its production to the max or beyond its normal production rate, is that going to be enough?

Let's hypnotically imagine that bitmain has to deliver a total of 100,000k miners by October, maybe 37k for riot, 10-20k for individuals orders over their website and some retail and the rest goes to other whales like RIOT, so 100K miners for 10 months is 10K miners a month, they need to increase their production by a factor of 8 to make enough gears to double the current hashrate, is it normal for bitmain to be able to secure enough chips for 10,000*8 = 80,000 miners a month when there is no chip shortage? it's unlikely that chip production has dropped by close to 87% because this is the only way bitmain is going to get 8 times the chips.

In other words:

No chip shortage = 80,000 gears
With chip shoratge = 10,000 gears
Shortage % = -87.5%

Do we really have a -87.5% shortage? I highly doubt it, so maybe the normal supply rate without shortage is just 2-3 times higher than now at best, so instead of 10k miners, they will make 30k miners? that's just about 400k miners per year.

The flip side of this, maybe Bitmain decides not to expand production even though demand is sky high, and then sell fewer miners at a much higher price point. Just seems like in the past, they do the opposite, and sell a ton of gear at prices low enough to try to really hurt their competition.

I believe, that they know very well that this demand won't last long and it's too risky to expand, they have made this mistake once with the overproduction of S9s which they had to sell for insane discounts, the only way I see them expand is if they

... secure contracts with all those giant >100MW farms.

And that is a big IF.

Anyway, these posts will be interesting to read when it's 2022.

[fr4nkthetank]

RIOT says they just got 2002 S19PROs, with deliveries expected to be on track for 4th quarter 2021 for the remaining 26100 miners.

https://www.riotblockchain.com/news-media/press-releases/detail/99/riot-blockchain-achieves-milestone-of-1-ehs-in-hash-rate

[philipma1957]

I am not an expert on solar panels but with some friends that we have researched on that, the problem is that you need power 24/365 per day and solar can not give it you. You need batteries to be able to store energy and have a much bigger solar panel installation to do so. That is why everyone goes near geothermal energy or hydroelectric because this can be constant supply.

not true.  It varies state to state and country to country.

most places in the world give 5 full hours or 19 dead 5 good. each day.

this is when you round them.  Ie 17 dead hours 3 poor hours near sunset and sunrise and 4 good hours comes to 5 hours.

Depening on the place you live and the local power company you sell your excess in those good hours and buy back during you dead and bad hours.

So 19 to 5 means about 24/5   so a 24000watt array nets 5000 watts 24 hours a day.

A 1 acre spot can do 240,000 watts at peak so your 24 hour average is 50,000 watts

The problem is you need to cut a deal with power companies and those deals vary greatly.
If people understood how much they were being fucked over by coal oil gas vs solar they would freak.

Here is a subsidy for coal oil and gas given by most developed countries . They do not require power companies to give fair deals for solar arrays.  Ie I sell you 10 kwatts for 5 hours in the sunlight that is 50 kwatts excess. I buy back at for equal price. This is not given to many solar arrays. Thus us us a negative hurting the array owner driving the price up.  So you handicap the solar owner and do not fine a coal company for the lung damage burning the coal causes.

So depending on your location an acre sized  solar array making 240,000 watts 5 hours a day or 1200 kwatts  daily using 50kwatts hourly would be zero cost in a subsidized spot. It  could cost as much as  1200-250 = 950 kwatts as the power company in some spots pays zero for the excess 950 kwatts you make at peak.

They burn coal and coal is getting that subsidy not the solar.

If people understood this they would be pissed off. Down the road we will drift away from coal/oil/gas unfortunately I am 64 and most likely will be too old to see it happen.

[wndsnb]

At most, the power grid should pay you the wholesale rate for power generation that they pay to all power generators. You want them to make special exceptions to solar arrays so you can use the grid for free, and have them pay you retail rates for power you put into the grid at arbitrary times. This is why I pay 21c/kWh for power in MA, because the grid is forced to pay retail rates for every solar array in the state. So my taxes are high because the government subsidizes solar arrays, and my power price is high because the government forces power companies to give special consideration to solar.

If you can't build a solar array and be profitable without the taxpayer helping out, then it isn't really profitable. You are just forcing all your neighbors to pay for your project.

Not to mention that it is not scalable. What do you think is going to happen when I try to build a 100MW solar array and then force the power grid to pay retail rates for the power I generate and ask the taxpayer to subsidize the cost of it so I can make tons of $ mining bitcoin?

At industrial scales, the all-in power generation cost for natural gas is under 2c/kWh, maybe even under 1c. Even at relatively small scales, you can do 500kW at under 3c/kWh. Solar can't come close to this.

[philipma1957]

and if it is zero the subsidy is going to the oil/gas/coal being burned.

the idea of a whole sale rate of 4 or 5 cents may be fair.

Now your state is not a good state it is about 1 hour less sun then my state. So of course the government it all its wisdom maxes the subsidy for solar and lowers the subsidy for coal/oil/gas.

every one burning world wide fucks the air up for breathing and if the company doing it is not helping solar to use its grid they are getting the subsidy.

The 4-6:cent idea works.

I am not in favor of global warming being the fault of burning fuel or the sun being too warm.

Clean air by not burning fuel I like. If the sun temp drops and we have an ice age think of the fuel we have wasted when we could be doing solar.
open your mind and think outside the box my way says global warming fake who cares global warming real who cares. either up scaling solar every where it is practical makes the most sense.

Your state may not be the best state to push hard on solar. But lots of places are.

If you scale a big farm to mine here is a one spot west virginia where they dug coal for a century .
so many open pits that could be converted to huge multi mega watt solar arrays.

If done a lot of power could go online and back to difficulty you could jump the fuck out of difficulty since more power is on line.

look at this stripped mountain in West Virgina
it should be a solar array bigly as trump would say.
to not see this as the worlds birth right (clean air to breath) provided by the coal mines that built the solar to mine btc
is to be close minded.  we could have this there right now.

https://i.imgur.com/AtumVVt.png

mining coins and using solar in conjunction with coal stripped mountains means thousands of acres of solar panels.

[Biffa]

[...]

It probably won't help future production of newer more efficient products that Apple has apparently "reserved" 80% of TSMC's 5nm production capacity for all of 2021.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Apple-secures-80-percent-of-TSMC-s-5-nm-production-capacity-for-the-coming-year.511153.0.html
https://wccftech.com/apple-secured-80-tsmc-5nm-production-capacity-2021/
https://www.cnbeta.com/articles/tech/1068385.htm

With both Nvidia and AMD scrambling for fab space for their GPU's and Sony and Microsoft in the same boat, Samsung could quickly run out of fab space too. Not sure how much room for 7nm there is however.

[philipma1957]

So if that is the case it may make us have an long extended flatness of hash rate which at  current price of 47k a coin means $$ for miners that have decent amount of gear.

I got a nice link from my warehouse partner

Jack Dorsey and Jay Z invest 500 BTC to make Bitcoin ‘internet’s currency’
Manish Singh, Tage Kene-Okafor / 5:51 AM EST•February 12, 2021

These startups can keep price high for btc.  2021 could be a true break out year for an established miner.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Heh...
Given what is happening with India looking to ban all crypto that is not governed by their Central Bank -- they may want to rethink that...

[wndsnb]

It's going to be interesting to see what the next batch of S19s Bitmain releases is priced at. And if they are going to continue to sell batches 6 months out, keeping 0 for spot orders.

The S19 is still using 7nm, so the 5nm congestion may delay the release of the next gen, which might actually have a major efficiency boost since they can take advantage of the new process instead of tweaking the old one.

Maybe after Apple gets ramped up on 5nm it will take some of the load off of the 7nm factories.

[philipma1957]

If you go back to 2017 we did not ramp up a lot in hash.  all of 2018 up to oct we just added gear world wide.

It could be this year price runs away like it did in 2017 and in 2022 gear catches up to price like it did in 2018.

I really hope this is true. While I am not perfectly positioned

Ie (4ph vs 1.7ph)

The 1.7ph along with the alt gear makes me well positioned to have a very nice year.

I wish I was 44 not 64 as I really want to see how all this is working in 2050.
for me to do that I have to be 93 years old. which would tie the  known record for oldest male in my family.

[kano]

...
If you go back to 2017 we did not ramp up a lot in hash.  all of 2018 up to oct we just added gear world wide.
...

reminder that in 2017 bitmain produced comparatively very little due to their internal problems ...

[mikeywith]

Given what is happening with India looking to ban all crypto that is not governed by their Central Bank -- they may want to rethink that...

I thought it's the main reason why they are targeting India and Africa because that's where the most "banning" is happening, no?

... which might actually have a major efficiency boost since they can take advantage of the new process instead of tweaking the old one.

MicroBT M30 is almost as efficient as the S19 pro it uses a Samsung chip of 8nm, so the 7nm Bitmain uses still has some room to improve.

There also something else to keep in mind, S19 custom firmware which will probably hit the market soon, will indeed bring in a good amount of hashrate, given how well the custom firmware did with the S17s series, I can only imagine it will do the same if not better with the S19, it might bring the S19 pro efficiency to below 25w/th.

I wish I was 44 not 64 as I really want to see how all this is working in 2050.
for me to do that I have to be 93 years old. which would tie the  known record for oldest male in my family.

I wish you live long enough to see that while staying healthy and happy, IMO 2050 and 2030 won't be very different, BTC now is in high school, sort of getting close to becoming the boring grown-up man who goes to work, get married, have 3 kids and start thinking of his retirement plan, in the next cycle or at most the one after that BTC should be in the multitrillion market grade, the block rewards will be too small and the whole ecosystem would have been so large and everything will be easily predicted.

In other words, I believe that in 2030, bitcoin price will stop doing 500% up and 70% down, mining won't be as profitable and crazy as it is now, everything will mature and become boring, I would just enjoy the end of the discovery era we are in now and not worry about 2050.

[alh]

About 75% through the current epoch (1503 blocks), and the projected difficulty increase is 2.5% to 2.7%, ending on Friday morning.

BTC still short of $50K at $49,223. As expected $50K is kind of a psychological barrier to price. Coinbase 1 month chart show $49,900 as the peak.

Edit: Looks like there was at least one trade on coinbase for $50,645 early in the morning 2/16/2021. The price didn't last and fell back to $49,xxx a few minutes later.

reminder that in 2017 bitmain produced comparatively very little due to their internal problems ...

Mustn't Spondoolies a real force back in 2017? Was that also the year we heard about mining light bulbs and miners in various appliances (e.g. TV, routers, etc)? I forgot the name of that company that paired up a Raspberry Pi with a "Mining HAT" that was going to really make micro-translations a big deal. Didn't they get $100 Million investment from somebody?

Ahhh the heady days of late 2017.......

Into the home stretch for this epoch (1803 blocks completed). BTC price now well above $50K at $51,673. Projected difficulty increase is at about +1.3% on Friday afternoon.

[philipma1957]

Into the home stretch for this epoch (1803 blocks completed). BTC price now well above $50K at $51,673. Projected difficulty increase is at about +1.3% on Friday afternoon.

Yeah, another great diff jump for mining.  2021 seems on making up for 2020 is on its mind.

If we do 1% jumps over and over we will whale.

I am interested to see the next jump:

at blocks 1-700 we are way up like 10% and then we drift back to 1-3%

this pattern happened 3 straight jumps.

will it happen again?

[NotFuzzyWarm]

As amazing as this years rise in price has been, methinks it is quickly going to climb even higher: MotleyFool has added BTC to its recommended investment strategies and has announced they will be buying $5million of it over the next few weeks  
https://cointelegraph.com/news/motley-fool-adding-5m-in-bitcoin-to-its-10x-portfolio-has-a-500k-price-target

Considering Motley has historically been one of the BTC naysayers that is one helluva endorsment from them!