WTF is going on with mining?

[hdbuck]

So here's my tought:

I've been mining for the fun of it but also for the profit i could get too. At least until now or just before the bubble back in november. However, i sold out my gear as it appeared mining wouldnt be as profitable as it used to be. Nowadays, with BTC price tanking, it seems mining isnt even close to ROI in fiat terms. I wouldnt even think of considering it from a BTC investment point of view.

After considering it for a while,it appears to me that there are 2 factors allowing such a decline in profitability:
- ASIC manufacturers are overpricing their products
- Bitcoin is undervalued

As much as i would love to think bitcoin is undervalued ATM, i think it still needs time to catch up. On the other hand, it also seems manufaturers such as spondoliees or bitmain are doing their best to offer good priced products - but still far from being profitable.

So my conclusion is this: the mining industry has grown too fast. this phenomenon had led to more centralisation of mining computing power since only bulk buyers where considered first before throwing the rest to us, individuals, that are nontheless the essence of what bitcoin tried to achieved when addressing that centralisation issue.

So WTF is next? are we at the point where mining difficulty should stabilize? will small players abandon the mining ship already? Will manufacturers lower their price even more? Will they go bankrupt? is bitcoin going to survive this? Or should we just dont care and wait for better times?

[smooth]

Small players should take a break IMO, unless you have a special advantage such as free electricity. Conditions are just not very good for mining right now.

If there is a glut of ASICs, ASIC manufacturers go bankrupt, and ASICs start getting liquidated, that will be the time to start mining again. Not until.

I've been mining on and off for three years and this is pretty much the first time I can remember that there isn't really anything worth buying.

[beatljuice]

I weep for the lack of math being done.

You guys just fill in your charts and believe them without question. The charts can't predict fiat price and they have no idea what the difficulty will be next month. You might have noticed the difficulty is leveling off and hardware is going on sale, meaning there is less demand. This will continue as long as the mathematically challenged keep saying "you can't make a profit mining" and people like myself keep making a profit.

Keep up the good work!

[taipo]

Heres a good guess at a possible future timeline.

Imagine if someone comes out with a self powered 30 watt USB stick that can do 100 GH/s, and you can run 20 of those on a Raspberry Pi. Even at todays low BTC rate / high difficulty, small scale miners will gobble that product up. Think thats crazy, then just go back 4 years in a time machine and say "imagine the day when you could get a machine that runs at 2 TH/s and only uses 1 kWh".

If you were contemplating the cost of running 5 Antminer S1s at 2 kWh vs 10 USB sticks at 300 watts, which would you choose. We saw this happen with SCRYPT and ASICs, it will happen again similar to this example, and we will only see more and more mining.

Small miners will become medium size miners. Medium scale miners will become big players. The difficulty will continue to rise.

When the day comes where the exchange of goods and services dwarf mining, then bitcoin prices will rise again and......mining will scale up again in mulitples of what you see today.

Its the nature of the beast.

[philipma1957]

Heres a good guess at a possible future timeline.

Imagine if someone comes out with a self powered 30 watt USB stick that can do 100 GH/s, and you can run 20 of those on a Raspberry Pi. Even at todays low BTC rate / high difficulty, small scale miners will gobble that product up. Think thats crazy, then just go back 4 years in a time machine and say "imagine the day when you could get a machine that runs at 2 TH/s and only uses 1 kWh".

If you were contemplating the cost of running 5 Antminer S1s at 2 kWh vs 10 USB sticks at 300 watts, which would you choose. We saw this happen with SCRYPT and ASICs, it will happen again similar to this example, and we will only see more and more mining.

Small miners will become medium size miners. Medium scale miners will become big players. The difficulty will continue to rise.

When the day comes where the exchange of goods and services dwarf mining, then bitcoin prices will rise again and......mining will scale up again in mulitples of what you see today.

Its the nature of the beast.

wrong.   just study power efficiency improvement..  you will see the watt to gh ratio no longer has much improvement.  

a gpu rig did 300 watts for 1gh  

 fgpa's  35 watts for 1gh

first asics 10 watts for 1 gh
then        7 watts for 1gh
then 2 watts for 1gh
then 1.1 watt for 1gh
then .7 watt for 1gh---------------------Sp10's can do this
next .46 watt for 1gh--------------------Sp30's promise us this.

So I ask you  how low do you think it gets to?    .3  or .2  maybe .1         lets pretend .1 watts is the best  that is 7x  the current .7 best there is.


How does that compare to 300 watts with a gpu compared to .7 .


hmmm 428 to 1 improvement  in watt to gh has happened.            .7 to .46 is scheduled  that is 1.52 to 1 in watt to  gh improvement .  maybe .7 to .1 will happen that is only 7x

   so growth should slow.  a lot.

[taipo]

Noone is saying its not going to slow down, its just not going to end any-time soon. If Spoondoleys can do 460 watts per terrahash, then some other manufacturer is going to do 46 watts per 100 GH. Then that will spawn a whole new range of mining rigs, until someone comes up with the 44 watt per 100 GH rig, and then a 40 watt per GH miner, and so on. Miners will change out their rigs when more efficient ones come out, and even install extra power in their houses if need be. The math means nothing to those in this craze, miners want to keep mining until they are broke, and living on the streets, even then they will be dreaming of ways to mine while living in a trash can.

The problem with most of those contributing to this forum is that you think there is logic and good sense at play here, there is none of that here.

[gallery2000]

Noone is saying its not going to slow down, its just not going to end any-time soon. If Spoondoleys can do 460 watts per terrahash, then some other manufacturer is going to do 46 watts per 100 GH. Then that will spawn a whole new range of mining rigs, until someone comes up with the 44 watt per 100 GH rig, and then a 40 watt per GH miner, and so on. Miners will change out their rigs when more efficient ones come out, and even install extra power in their houses if need be. The math means nothing to those in this craze, miners want to keep mining until they are broke, and living on the streets, even then they will be dreaming of ways to mine while living in a trash can.

The problem with most of those contributing to this forum is that you think there is logic and good sense at play here, there is none of that here.

Hi guys

I mined. I went broke. I live in a hotel, not trash can.

[saurabh]

I believe mining is really bad addiction.

[jamesc760]

It's worse than crack for sure. More expensive and harder to kick.

[BSIG]

Dog eat dog in the BTC world. People are greedy when they see the B sign in front of them, similar to reasoning with crack heads, nobody wins.

[solarion]

Not seeing a whole bunch of leveling off yet and the huge numbers of people still willing to gamble on pre-orders will ensure that we badly overshoot sane mining profit margins(we already are for people with high power costs).

[Bitcoin++]

Irony is that if every miner stopped investing in more miners, then every miner would make a profit.

Tragedy of the commons ...

[btchedge]

This is an interesting chart...

[Soros Shorts]

Irony is that if every miner stopped investing in more miners, then every miner would make a profit.

Tragedy of the commons ...

I think that it's the new miners that's  causing the problem. If only we could keep them out of the club ...

[malkbaby]

BTC mining's a very expensive hobby

[Nagle]

So here's my tought:
...
After considering it for a while,it appears to me that there are 2 factors allowing such a decline in profitability:
- ASIC manufacturers are overpricing their products
- Bitcoin is undervalued

You're missing the biggest factor - the number of Bitcoins mined per week is constant, no matter how many miners there are. All miners compete for a Bitcoin pool of fixed size.

Now go look at the difficulty graph. 

[btc_uzr]

Irony is that if every miner stopped investing in more miners, then every miner would make a profit.

Tragedy of the commons ...

I think that it's the new miners that's  causing the problem. If only we could keep them out of the club ...

With 'new' I assume you mean Cointerra with their new PH-center in addition to the KnC-Monster in Boden ?
Together they might have something like 25% of the Network or even more, then add the Chinese Manufactures mining on their own..
I assume home-miners are less than 15% and decreasing.

The 'problem' is that there is way more legal backup than before in addition to a growing public awareness.
Means mining is getting interesting from a business point of view, so it attracts investors and motivates manufacturers to build their own mega-mines. We never had this situation before.

The average person can't compete with almost free energy and cooling like you find in North of Sweden and Island for example.
Think of chickens, how cheap they are [when thousands of them grow up unnaturally in a tiny space] - no (hobby) farmer can compete with the price per chicken. And since all bitcoins have the same quality it's even worse then the chicken market, because no one pays a better price per BTC when it is an organic home mined one or pays less for an industrially produced under questionable conditions from people you dislike.

Centralization is inevitable in middle term. The only question is how long it takes.
And no, it won't have much impact as you might hope or think. Average person doesn't care about BTC's original idea I'd say.
All they care about is a secure and comfortable way to pay, same counts for all stores and sales points.

[taipo]

Along with that, it still comes down to a numbers game. Once the difficulty rises to the point where the cost to run miners ( power, replacement parts, data center costs etc ) no matter the size of the farm, reaches about 85% of the income ( about a diff of 40 billion ), then the growth in the mining industry will have sufficiently slowed as the business model begins to approach a more conventional model of about 15% profit. Then you will start to see difficulty fluctuating up and down, rather than jumping 15% every 2 weeks.

[philipma1957]

Along with that, it still comes down to a numbers game. Once the difficulty rises to the point where the cost to run miners ( power, replacement parts, data center costs etc ) no matter the size of the farm, reaches about 85% of the income ( about a diff of 40 billion ), then the growth in the mining industry will have sufficiently slowed as the business model begins to approach a more conventional model of about 15% profit. Then you will start to see difficulty fluctuating up and down, rather than jumping 15% every 2 weeks.

this is what will happen in the long run…… lets say 5 cents a k-watt for power and .5 watts per hash    at 450 usd a coin .  no one earns money.

 zero growth without   btc  fiat rise.


this chart shows  a data center with all sp30's   and 5 cents a k-watt  no money for cooling and the gear was built for free.

no data center can do that but if it could it would tap out next year.  So we are going to see a max for data center growth.

[taipo]

Sure, but the point is, noone no matter big or small is going to continue expanding their mining rigs exponentially once profits drop below 15%, so its not going to reach zero unless at some point the said mining operation ceases expanding, then they will just go out of business. As the difficulty rises, manufacturing improvements taper off, then the ability to expand will decrease, but it won't cease. I think we will see this tapering happen after about 40 billion => the problem is, many miners are hoping it will happen sooner, it won't.

A rise in fiat would probably result in a rise in the price of miners to match.

The days of purchasing a 2 TH/s miner and pocketing $300 a week from it will be over after the difficulty reaches and passes 40 Billion ( assuming the general trend in the price of BTC remains constant ). It would be more like, 2 TH/s = $30 running cost, earning $35 a week in BTC = $5 profit. Basically, keep the house warm in winter plus $5 for a cup of coffee and a muffin / scone / donut.