Topic: Block Reward Halving + BFL Equipment = What for Mining / Price In Your Opinion? (Read 3362 times)

Day 14: Mining operators are still seeing electric bills from the previous month's consumption.  Even more anger, vitriol and gnashing of teeth.

Let us Individuals have the Mining and all you Companies keep doing the Hardware.  It's things like this that taking away opportunities for the Small Individuals that would like to have a Nice Hobby and Make a Little money as well!! 

PPS and DGM miners are not being paid fairly. If the ENTIRE BTC network was one giant proportoinal pool, we would ALL get our FAIR share and make shady pool owners and pool hopping a thing of the past.

This link from ebay shows me this ??  (Im in Canada) Like previous poster said, b/c Win7 and HD ??

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??

Stephen, Very nice post !  Pretty accurate actually
I agree except that I bet that some ASIC will be delivered before 2013 !

No, just that instead of parting out systems entire rigs are sold, in quantity ("everything must go").  So to make it easier, the title for the seller's listing simply refers to the Ghash/s capacity rather than describing the components (e.g., 3X5970).

Here's an example:

What came first was that this is a set of rigs with 2.4 Ghash/s capacity,
and secondary was that the 2.4 Ghash is coming from eight 5830s.

 - http://www.ebay.com/itm/Bitcoin-mining-server-2400-mhash-s-8x-Sapphire-ATI-Radon-5830-Video-Cards-/121019863443?pt=COMP_EN_Servers&hash=item1c2d589193

What is the "N Ghash/s for sale" though?  Are you referring to mining contracts?

Looks like the first three are coming in as being fairly accurate.

This is a prediction, and predictions are hard -- especially about the future.  Nobody knows, but I'll take a stab at it.

Day 0 is expected roughly around November 30th, plus or minus a week:

Day T-10: Four of the five ASIC manufacturers claim to be finalizing the design / optimizing / trying to resolve some nagging power issue / whatever, yet not a single person that pre-paid for an ASIC has one in-hand.
Day T-8: Difficulty of 3.5 million and exchange rate of $15 mean profitability is still acceptable for GPU miners paying average electric rates or less.
Day T-5: A lot more "N Ghash/s for sale" listings will start to appear [Edit: as-in total liquidation of N GHash/s of capacity]

at the end of the day there will need to be a given return on hardware investment for mining to be "profitable".

Just because you aren't earning 1%/day return does NOT mean mining is not profitable.

Say somebody spends $1000 on a asic unit and is able to earn $5/day. by almost all other measures that is a GREAT return as it is $1825/year.  Even halfing that it is still not that bad at all.

Of course the lifecycle of the units and resale value will greatly determine what that minimum profitablility level is.

I think that's not a bad way to estimate. This should work out pretty well in the long run (all else being equal, especially exchange rate).

Day 365: No more GPUs or FPGAs hashing. Bitcoin network hashing rate: 1250 TH/s.

How did I work out the final network hash rate?

Assuming we are currently hashing at 25 TH/s (ref. 2), with current equipment generally providing 20 (MH/s)/W (ref. 1), that means that mining is currently consuming 1250,000 W of power. BFL will provide 1 (GH/s)/W (ref. 3), so if the power consumption stays constant, we should see the network hash rate rise to 1250 TH/s.

(However, many miners might just leave the game. However, many miners might join the game.)

References:
(1) https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining_hardware_comparison
(2) http://blockchain.info/stats
(3) https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/announcement-bfl-asic-release-specifications-114292

Have you done the math? How are you going to mine "at marginal loss" with a GPU at difficulty well over 100 million (which should easily be the case if "several will dump asics for cheap")?

Still trying to comprehend all the factors but it seems to me like there's a bit of a bubble in the whole ASIC thing. This will cause the profitability to drop off quickly as the first orders come in and are put online. This will cause the some of the asic producing companies to go out of business. Several will dump asics for cheap. ASIC mining will continue barely profitably (since ASIC production is determined solely by desire to mine bitcoins, unlike GPU production), some of us will continue to GPU mine at a marginal loss.

Firstly, this post belongs in either Speculation or Mining Speculation,  [Edit: I see that has happened already.]

Firstly, this post belongs in either Speculation or Mining Speculation,  [Edit: I see that has happened already.]


This is a prediction, and predictions are hard -- especially about the future.  Nobody knows, but I'll take a stab at it.

Day 0 is expected roughly around November 30th, plus or minus a week:

Day T-10: Four of the five ASIC manufacturers claim to be finalizing the design / optimizing / trying to resolve some nagging power issue / whatever, yet not a single person that pre-paid for an ASIC has one in-hand.
Day T-8: Difficulty of 3.5 million and exchange rate of $15 mean profitability is still acceptable for GPU miners paying average electric rates or less.
Day T-5: A lot more "N Ghash/s for sale" listings will start to appear [Edit: as-in total liquidation of N GHash/s of capacity]
Day T-4: Difficulty for Litecoin rises as miners experiment, causing there to be no chance of profit from Litecoin mining either.
Day T-3: Block 209,664 -- last difficulty adjustment before the block subsidy reward drops (fact, not a prediction)
Day T-1: Last day that anywhere near 7,200 BTC is produced (fact, not a prediction)
Day 0: Block 210,000 hits and only about 3,600 are produced (fact, not a prediction)
Day 1: Blocks slow to about 11 minutes as some GPU miners realize basic math and power down.
Day 2: Exchange rate volatile, both up and down, but returns to previous levels -- about $15.
Day 3: Anger and vitriol from GPU miners who are still "underwater" on their GPUs purchased in 2012.
Day 4: Anger and vitriol from FPGA miners who somehow didn't realize that "much more efficient" doesn't protect against a revenue drop of 50%
Day 5: Blocks slow to about 12 minutes as more GPU miners realize the payouts are dismal and begin to proceed past "denial", the first step in the grieving process,
Day 6: ASIC hardware developers see an even greater number of prepayments for hardware.  Much gnashing of teeth on the forums.
Day 7: Hashing on CoinLab's GPU network grows tremendously as miners cash in their built-up loyalty credits.
Day 8: Nearly all NVidia GPUs that were used for mining are now either computing with CoinLab or have been decommissioned.
Day 9: Gamers elated over some really good AMD and NVidia graphics cards available "really, really cheap" on eBay.
Day 10: Blocks slow to about 13 minutes, as not only did the block reward subsidy drop but so did the frequency of blocks -- making mining bring in even less revenue each day.
Day 11: Speculators hoping for the "doubling" of the exchange rate realize it didn't happen (or perhaps already happened, from $5-ish, over the summer), and sell off a little  Exchange rate drops to $12-ish.
Day 12: ASIC manfuacturers claim to be finalizing the design / optimizing / trying to resolve some nagging power issue / whatever, yet not a single person that pre-paid for an ASIC has one in-hand.
Day 13: Block 211,680 - difficulty adjusts.  Drops 15%.  Back to one block every ten minutes.
Day 14: Mining operators are still seeing electric bills from the previous month's consumption.  Even more anger, vitriol and gnashing of teeth.
Day 15: Christmas-related activities overtake bitcoin as being the event more important to many mining operators.
Day 25: The daily "average price" remains in a range between $12 and $15.
Day 26: Many "slightly used" GPU cards land in wrapped boxes under trees.  Others, particularly those who had a larger investment in their GPU rigs, are using the phrase "bah, humbug" more than they had in any prior holiday season.
Day 27: Difficult adjusts, dropping another 5%.  Yawn.
Day 30: ASIC manufacturers claim to be finalizing the design / optimizing / trying to resolve some nagging power issue / whatever, yet not a single person that pre-paid for an ASIC has one in-hand.