Unless YOU can buy a more efficient miner it doesn't matter what the self mining corps have.
We will see in 6 months;
Of course it matters. Its actually the other way around. Its not what *you* pay that decide the profitability of Bitcoin, its what *most* of the network pay their gh/$/day upkeep that does.
Home miners is a minority and the profitability of S7 will go down regardless of if Bitmain release a S9 or not by then.
Difficulty is not going to stop going up because home miner are no longer getting competitive hardware available and the halving won't stop from dropping the profitability of all miners just because *you* can't get a more profitable miner.
This is a debate I have had in my mind more then one time. I have been home mining since 2012. Difficulty was once 25% per jump for an entire year. It is now around 2.5% for the last year.
The true home miner has 1 thing going for him that the farms don't the ability to use the heat. So for 7 months a year my mining cost drops as I use the free heat.
The biggest thing against a home miner is most homes are 200 amps which caps you at 100amps or so for mining even if you do three 30 amp 240 circuits
You have 90 x 240 x .80 watts or 17 kwatts. so this would be 15 s-7's as a max that is 72 th
72 th earns .59btc a day
when I was doing gpus and was using 6-7 kwatts back in 2012 I was earning 1 btc a day
So in btc power cost we are losing.
17 kwatts gets .59btc 2015 using gear that spends .25 watts a gh
7 kwatts gets 1 btc 2012 using gear that spends 300 watts a gh
so with gear that is 1200 x better 1 btc costs 28.8 times the power
price factors into this
2012 price 10 bucks
2015 price 240 bucks
the is 24 x but power is 28.8 x
so The cost to get a coin is worse.
more on this as the price for gear in 2012 was 22 x 350 =7k gpus and 3k in pc parts or 10k
15 s-7's cost = 15 x 1650 or 24750
so 2012 = 10k
2015 = 24.750k make it 25k
so gear is 2.5x the price
All this is killing home mining and all mining.
once you factor all this in it is 3x more costly to get a coin in 2015 then in 2012. Not good at all or is btc undervalued and should be 720 usd not 240 usd?
I'm fairly certain if the price raise by that much, there will just be more massive data center that get onlined and profitability will more or less be back to the same with the difficulty increase.
After all, the profitability is decided by what the majority pay, not what we pay, so we're pretty much just being dragged along, whether you have 50A capacity or 200A capacity.
For a home, you may have access to 90A 240V which is much better than my conservative 70A at 120V vs a max of 125A for my complete apartment.
The difference between now's hardware and then's hardware (2012) is even if now it cost 2x more, it should be profitable for longer.
But our real only advantage is as you say, we make use of the heat if we needed it either way. But there is a limit to that as its not like we need 10kW heating 24/7.
So Home miners have it very hard right now, and very cheap electricity cost is needed. Like access to Hydro electricity or such. That way you can rush and buy all the S5 when the mass of home miner rush to the S7. As we expected many S5 has fallen down for sale with the S7's coming.