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

[kano]

...
If the motive is to obey the government rules then all it takes to kill bitcoin would be a similar ban in the U.S and a few more countries.
...

Far from it.
People still, 11 years later, seem to have some misunderstanding that the US matters.

[1714048922]

1714048922

[1714048922]

1714048922

[1714048922]

1714048922

[1714048922]

1714048922

[mikeywith]

People still, 11 years later, seem to have some misunderstanding that the US matters.

I understand that you have some reading comprehension issues, you also cherry-pick people's words just to fit them into a frame of your choice, I mentioned the U.S in this context being the largest mining hub after China (it's probably the largest now), so it's not about the U.S, it's about the size of mining operations going in said country.

Besides, mining aside, the truth is:  unless you live in a vacuum -- the U.S does matter.

[kano]

People still, 11 years later, seem to have some misunderstanding that the US matters.

...
you also cherry-pick people's words just to fit them into a frame of your choice
...
I mentioned the U.S in this context being the largest mining hub after China (it's probably the largest now)
...

Thus you confirmed that indeed, I didn't cherry pick anything ... ... ... at least you could be consistent ...

So, do you have your own proof of this statement? Or are you just regurgitating typical online sites that was visitors, not facts?
Where were the last 10000 blocks mined?

Anyway, who knows? maybe the US government will ban Bitcoin or make it worse for mining?
Not really that far fetched.
But who cares?

Bitcoin is not designed for government approval even if you want that.

[mikeywith]

So, do you have your own proof of this statement? Or are you just regurgitating typical online sites that was visitors, not facts?

LOL.. the facts are all over the internet, are you saying that the U.S is not at least the second largest mining hub after China?

You know the largest pools like Viabtc , btc.com , poolin and foundry provide IP statistics to Cambridge and they conducted a dozen studies which all are available online for free.

There are other ways to confirm this if you care to read.. China was 1st the U.S was second but this was before the ban in China. As of right now the U.S is most likely the LARGEST mining hub.

By the way, you own a mining pool I would ask you to conduct a similar study but then your pool size is so tiny so sadly the study will be extremely inaccurate.

[philipma1957]

Come on guys "why can't we be friends"


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uj4551M2Qjk



watch it smile a bit.



I am soooo tired of the sniping  at each other myself included.

I am caring for my bro-in-law he is 71 in 2 weeks

He had covid last year and is now suffering from multiple cognitive issues.

I wish I could should the ring video of him (it would be a violation of his privacy) so that we could all get perspective on our online fighting.

My bro-in-law is heavily fucked in his brain and since is body is fine may have to walk around for years with a damaged mind.

When I see the fighting we sometimes do here and I think about what to do about a guy that will stay sick for the rest of his life it does put this in perspective.

[kano]

...
You know the largest pools like Viabtc , btc.com , poolin and foundry provide IP statistics to Cambridge and they conducted a dozen studies which all are available online for free.
...

Do you have a link to this absurd statement that those pools provide private information about all their miners to 3rd parties, even recently, to do 12 studies?

The only graph I've seen was way out of date, wrong, and made a blatantly false assumption that all miners on any pool had to be a few milliseconds from the pool they mined on.

It's only 60ms from NY to LA ... ... ... 80ms from NY to Netherlands ... ... ... 100ms from LA to HongKong ... ... ...

Please, if you wanna have an argument about something, provide valid information, don't quote some advertisement.
Posting unreliable, and easily proven false information to try and convince people about things you want to be true is as bad as making it up yourself, and you seem to like doing this.

This started with me pointing out something I've pointed out all over this forum in many posts over the years, that the us is not the centre of bitcoin. You made a post effectively stating that, and I simply corrected it.
You then decided to clarify that you were certainly stating that while also in the same post saying you weren't ... lulz

...
By the way, you own a mining pool I would ask you to conduct a similar study but then your pool size is so tiny so sadly the study will be extremely inaccurate.

Well, I would be able to find out where most of the blocks come from at least - but that, again, doesn't decide where they were actually mined.

[PrimeNumber7]

...
You know the largest pools like Viabtc , btc.com , poolin and foundry provide IP statistics to Cambridge and they conducted a dozen studies which all are available online for free.
...

Do you have a link to this absurd statement that those pools provide private information about all their miners to 3rd parties, even recently, to do 12 studies?

See the methodology of the Cambridge Bitcoin Electricity Consumption Index for their mining map.

It doesn't appear that the actual IP address is disclosed, but that information about IP addresses are disclosed, such as the geolocation of the IP address.

Per the above mining map, approximately 16.85% of bitcon's hashrate is located in the US. This is the physical location of mining equipment, based on their hashrate, as reported by the pools.

[kano]

methodology

Well they state their stats are only about 1/3 of the global hash rate, and assume that all other 2/3 of mining is distributed the same.
Clearly incorrect:

So BitFury's own mining farms, for example, match those 4 pools they listed? No.
There are plenty of block finders that are specific to their region, and in no way distributed like the 4 pools they use.

Someone clearly had a deadline to produce results and simply extrapolated the 1/3 they were only able to get ...

----------

Meanwhile, back on subject, speculation, another price jump up today ... I wonder if that's gonna push up the hash rate again.
It's certainly been looking like 9%-10% so far this diff change.

[stompix]

Please, if you wanna have an argument about something, provide valid information, don't quote some advertisement.

So, if the US doesn't matter, who does?
Because till now, if we agree that the methodology that puts the US in the first spot is bad then we are left with the one obvious question, who is the leader?

And there are very few candidates that could be taken seriously, as long as we use math and not volcano memes, we need countries with a ton of extra energy, countries with cheap energy on top of that, it doesn't matter if Iceland has cheap energy as long as they only have at maximum 2 Twh to spare out of their total production of 20Twh they will never have enough to be an important player.
We can safely exclude Europe from this, so how many are left, 4, 5?

Which of those can make the US look like a dwarf when it comes to mining?

As for the difficulty, it's clear it's playing with us,

Current Pace:   103.9278%  (285 / 274.23 expected, 10.77 ahead)
Next Difficulty Change:   between +1.0766% and +4.2251%

at this pace, the hashrate would be 8% lower than during that late jump we had at the end of the last week which pushed the jump to 4%.
With a price climbing again almost 7k since then nothing would make sense so I think we could safely blame at least half of that jump and this slump (142blocks/24h) on pure randomness and only half on actual mining.

[mikeywith]

Because till now, if we agree that the methodology that puts the US in the first spot is bad then we are left with the one obvious question, who is the leader?

The methodology is rather solid, even ignoring that, who bought most of Bitmain gears in large contracts? it's all U.S-based companies with mining facilities in the U.S, after the China ban - the U.S became the LARGEST mining hub on planet earth, it's not even worth debating, really.

So, if the US doesn't matter, who does?

Anyone who thinks that is likely delusional.  if the U.S bans mining it will have a worse impact on everything crypto-related than the China ban, the U.S will make 60-70% of the world countries follow the ban, I hate the U.S government as much as anyone else does, but it is what it is, Europe, Australia, the Middle-east, some of the many Anti-China countries in Asia, they will obey the U.S and ban bitcoin mining, in fact, the U.S can easily pass a new international law against BTC and that will hurt it really bad.

Come on guys "why can't we be friends"

Phill, I guess everyone here knows who is the person that has trouble making friends around the forum.

[stompix]

Well, I know I have a biased view on things, I know that's I've spent sometimes more energy trying to find numbers to prove my theory rather than actually checking if something is wrong with it and I also know I have been wrong countless times. So, I was trying to find a way to have this debate with figures, on both sides, let's hear why you think these are wrong and how do yours look and where do they come from, and if indeed numbers pop up and contradict what I believed I would change my opinion although I don't see those possible.

While I still believe at this point the US to still be nowhere near the share China once had even if we talk recently, I don't think there is any country on this planet that could threaten their place, especially since I've run through all those press releases and statements, they are gearing up for 70 exa, common!!! And if we expand it from mining to the actual influence on price, things here are pretty clear, it is not that the US is the major player is the only one, and they alone could cause real damage if they do something stupid which I hope they won't.
As a European, I would love to see things happening in a different way but reason tells me we have no say in this compared to the US.

[kano]

Which of those can make the US look like a dwarf when it comes to mining?

Alas that's the point, no one actually knows, and that 'chosen' web site is producing rubbish based on it own comments saying they only know 1/3 of the hash rate ... and that 1/3, from 4 pools that are 'supposedly' providing them with 100% true, post mining processed data ...
(and I'm still wondering where the dozen studies, based on invalid data, someone said existed are ...)

There are large mining farms in places that are directly available for good power rates (a lot on green energy) and good environments for mining, that for some unexpected reasons that study thinks has little or no hash rate ... so it's clearly missing a lot of data ...
Just to name a few: Iceland, Georgia, Sweden, Canada, Russia

As for the difficulty, it's clear it's playing with us,

Current Pace:   103.9278%  (285 / 274.23 expected, 10.77 ahead)
Next Difficulty Change:   between +1.0766% and +4.2251%

at this pace, the hashrate would be 8% lower than during that late jump we had at the end of the last week which pushed the jump to 4%.
With a price climbing again almost 7k since then nothing would make sense so I think we could safely blame at least half of that jump and this slump (142blocks/24h) on pure randomness and only half on actual mining.

Yeah it's still falling fast ... now around 2% ... ... ... sounds like someone switch off something very large in the last 24 hours ...
... or we just had a continuation of few more days of ridiculously high luck until yesterday ... or a combo of the two ...

Edit: now 1% (at 301 blocks)

[NotFuzzyWarm]

A general discussion thread about El Salvador has kinda gone off the Topic rails and drifted squarely into this thread's intent so...

And still nothing about TSMC cancelling of any BM orders although considering BM still has S19's in stock, I can certainly see BM reducing their order for new chips.

The second one is stating that:

Industry watchers said Bitmain is reducing 20,000 unit orders of TSMC’s 5nm node process in the fourth quarter, totaling US$300 million in value.

The quote  is repeated through multiple newspapers, most of them focused on Asia and Taiwan 1 , 2 so something happened.

Maybe I have phrased this wrong as it probably implied TSMC cutting ties with Bitmain while maybe simply Bitmain didn't ant that many chips but at least we trust the reports a 20k wafers order is gone. Also, totally possible that they have too many on stock and not enough orders, so it might have nothing to do with either price capacity or anything else but in the end, the result is fewer miners produced, putting a 300exa further and further away.

Frankly I love the idea of BM cutting back on production. Just means that diff rise will remain at a reasonable rate at least through the rest of the year  

Hmm, wonder if this order of miners from Canaan for HIVE has something to do with the recent rise in hash rate? They were due for delivery late August thru Sept. https://forkast.news/canaan-grows-crypto-rig-sales-as-chinese-miners-tool-up-abroad/

[philipma1957]

My hope is 2022 is actually better than 2021.
It would be very nice indeed.


Car production = way down.

Microwaves = very hard to get.

Gpus = next to impossible to find

If 2022 mirrors 2021

 I am going to be very happy about being  miner.

Diff tanked like mad.

https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator ...

Latest Block:   703900  (a few seconds ago)

Current Pace:   102.3354%  (317 / 309.77 expected, 7.23 ahead)

Previous Difficulty:   18997641161758.95                           
Current Difficulty:   19893045048575.13                           
Next Difficulty:   between 20040464874324 and 20411224438526

Next Difficulty Change:   between +0.7411% and +2.6048%

Previous Retarget:   last Monday at 7:27 PM  (+4.7132%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   October 18, 2021 at 11:47 AM  (in 11d 12h 42m 16s)
Next Retarget (latest):   October 18, 2021 at 5:13 PM  (in 11d 18h 9m 1s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 16h 19m 55s and 13d 21h 46m 41s


...

Stack your coins boys and girls. mine and hodl as much as you can.

[mikeywith]

Diff tanked like mad.
https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator ...

Latest Block:   703900  (a few seconds ago)

Current Pace:   102.3354%  (317 / 309.77 expected, 7.23 ahead)

Previous Difficulty:   18997641161758.95                            
Current Difficulty:   19893045048575.13                            
Next Difficulty:   between 20040464874324 and 20411224438526

Next Difficulty Change:   between +0.7411% and +2.6048%

Previous Retarget:   last Monday at 7:27 PM  (+4.7132%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   October 18, 2021 at 11:47 AM  (in 11d 12h 42m 16s)
Next Retarget (latest):   October 18, 2021 at 5:13 PM  (in 11d 18h 9m 1s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 16h 19m 55s and 13d 21h 46m 41s

Just about 2 hours since you posted this, it tanked even more

Latest Block:   703908  (27 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   100.2816%  (325 / 324.09 expected, 0.91 ahead)
Previous Difficulty:   18997641161758.95                            
Current Difficulty:   19893045048575.13                            
Next Difficulty:   between 19924409916721 and 19999250504296
Next Difficulty Change:   between +0.1577% and +0.5339%
Previous Retarget:   last Tuesday at 1:27 AM  (+4.7132%)

Gotta love it when nobody finds a block for half an hour, . after the recent price jump, I will be very very very surprised if we don't get a good jump at least similar to the previous epoch, it just does not make sense that we end this epoch with the current figures, it's next to impossible.

[stompix]

And we went negative

Latest Block:   703948  (5 minutes ago)
Current Pace:   99.5946%  (365 / 366.49 expected, 1.49 behind)
Next Difficulty Change:   between -0.1839% and -0.0606%

Here is the percentage by blocks mined 3 days vs 24 hours:

1   F2Pool   18.04 %   
2   AntPool   17.37 %   
3   ViaBTC   14.48 %   
4   Poolin   13.14 %   
5   Foundry USA   9.58 %   
6   Binance Pool   8.69 %
7   BTC.com   8.02 %

1   ViaBTC   15.25 %   
2   Poolin   14.41 %   
3   AntPool   13.56 %   
4   Foundry USA   13.56 %   
5   BTC.com   11.86 %   
6   F2Pool   11.86 %   
7   Binance Pool   9.32 %

   

Something wrong with some miners at F2Pool?

[PrimeNumber7]

methodology

Well they state their stats are only about 1/3 of the global hash rate, and assume that all other 2/3 of mining is distributed the same.
Clearly incorrect:

So BitFury's own mining farms, for example, match those 4 pools they listed? No.
There are plenty of block finders that are specific to their region, and in no way distributed like the 4 pools they use.

Someone clearly had a deadline to produce results and simply extrapolated the 1/3 they were only able to get ...

Do you have some specific data point(s) to suggest that these pools are not representative of the entire population of miners?

BitFury is one entity that is not representative of the network as a whole. The same is true for any other individual miner.

In terms of the number of blocks found in any given difficulty period, those pools are statically significant to all blocks found. 

It is very unusual to survey an entire population to find out authoritative information about a population.

[philipma1957]

And surprise, indeed a surprise at least for me, if we look right now at the numbers, the jump looks like has been caused by luck and everything else was a coincidence.

Current Pace:   100.9908%  (1210 / 1198.13 expected, 11.87 ahead)
Current Pace:   104.5365%  (1670 / 1597.53 expected, 72.47 ahead)

26 hours later

Current Pace:   103.9489%  (1941 / 1867.26 expected, 73.74 ahead)

So over the last day, the pace has come back to the normal difficulty and in the exact 24 hours, it has gone down to 139 blocks.

I know this is going to come and bite me ferociously in the a*** next day but if indeed the 115% pace for the previous 2-3 days was caused by miners and not luck it makes no sense for them to turn everything back off at >$47.5k.
Less than 13 hours left so at this point numbers won't be telling that much, the 4-5 days of the next epoch if the price remains unchanged will clear things up.

I won't deny the fact that a price increase will definitely make some miners turning their gear to different setups but I doubt that a jump of 10% in price would trigger an increase of 15-20% in hash rate from that alone. Combined with something else, of course, but 30 exa out of low/high settings, nope!

It does make sense if they are really big and can alter from 50 to 60 th on a lot of s17's

They can control the diff in such a way that it does not run away.  if you mine hard from day 4 to day 13 then back off on day 14

you get 14 new days at say 18.9 vs 19.2

and uou mine hard next time for days 3-13 that is 11 days of harder mining at a low diff.

all possible if you have excess E9 s17 or s19 and L7 gear.

you simply juggle the gear from best paying per watt day to day.

Maybe they mined hard on days 12,13,14 and 1,2 and then backed off.

This would be really good if true.

It means they are trying to tamp the diff down. It also means if they are Bitmain a lack of chips. They can not sell tons of gear for profit.

We know diff was once 25.01 and is now 19+. that is a lot of offline gear.

Best would be the illegal mine got caught and shut down along with the gear being crushed.



Some one mentioned an illegal mine getting online.  Maybe it was 5eh that is about 2-3 % using in my head math.

Still a 54k price and -1% = $$ for us miners.

[mikeywith]

And we went negative

It won't last.

Something wrong with some miners at F2Pool?

That's quite a drop, but probably a combination of luck and miners going offline, I am in their telegram group which is pretty active, I checked and nobody seems to have any issue with the pool itself.

BitFury is one entity that is not representative of the network as a whole. The same is true for any other individual miner.

He is cherry-picking stuff to support his claim, he mentioned Bitfury mining farms which are probably closed by now, and he ignored companies like (Marathon Digital,Core Scientific, Blockfi, DMG, Riot, and many more mining farms that are located in the U.S, these companies alone probably have 25EH and it's growing, the public data for these companies bulk orders from Bitmain and the other major mining manufactures show roughly 50EH ( probably half runs now based on a rough estmiate).

So if anything, Cambridge's study was unfair to the mining share of the U.S since most of those large guys have their own mining pools.

In terms of the number of blocks found in any given difficulty period, those pools are statically significant to all blocks found. 
It is very unusual to survey an entire population to find out authoritative information about a population.

The last study put China first and the U.S second, 1/3 is more than enough sample size, with the Ban in China we say 40-50% drop in the total hashrat, which suggests that the majority of the hashrate in China went offline (unless someone thinks that banning bitcoin mining in China will cause miners in the U.S to shutdown), so without a doubt right now the U.S is the largest mining hub.

[kano]

...
In terms of the number of blocks found in any given difficulty period, those pools are statically significant to all blocks found.

It is very unusual to survey an entire population to find out authoritative information about a population.

It is completely unusual to survey a non-random sample to decide about a population ...

That sample is very different from a rather large % of the rest of the network ...

Picking 4 of the top 10 publicly mineable pools (and no closed mining sources) to decide where every miner must be on the planet is an obvious non-random sample.

That's standard statistics, clearly the person who merited your comment 4 points has no idea about statistics.

Also, all large pools are mostly made up of a number of large miners, the random small miners probably account for less than 20% of the hash rate.

--

As for miners with future orders that don't have their hash rate ... well ... oddly enough that doesn't really mean much at all ... especially since those deliveries from BM seem to be having major difficulties for this entire year ... and who knows when they will arrive ... or how much hash rate they will be when they arrive ...

Then of course there's Canaan who has changed to using their miners themselves ...

... I also wonder why Bitfury still makes and sells chips and has a new mining chip that came out this year ... that even BM hasn't done that ...
Though I did point out a large set in the line after my Bitfury comment ... and more in my next post ...
Personally I have no idea how large Bitfury is, they are just a specific example of many miners that don't distribute their own hash rate in any way like those 4 pools do, but clearly someone else who posted doesn't know anything about Bitfury ...
... cherry-picking ... pot ... kettle ...