Topic: Date for 25 BTC per Block - page 4. (Read 35016 times)

2052, OMG it is actually going to happen.

at this point its up to the ASIC developers. they could be the sole decider of this bet.

they at most will only be testing their hardware before the halve now and they could throw in a lot of machines to test if they have them ready before the ~ nov 26 calculation and then take the hardware off after difficulty increases and thus less blocks be made everywhere but first scare off people to sell their hardware and no longer mine

As difficulty goes up (more than 6 blocks found per hour), the estimated time for halving approaches more rapidly. Using bitcoinclock.com , it's fairly easy to see that the halving will occur between 1800 hours 11/27/2012 and 0600 11/28/2012 with current 'block finding trends'. ASICs entering the market would have a serious effect on this, however.

The market definitely knew the halving was coming, that much is known ... what it did about it is less known.

I'd say it is safe to say that design/build/test pipeline for ASIC's, which has been well over a year in the making, had an eye on the halving date as a loose milestone target date ... how could they not have? The "market" is a reflection of the decisions and thoughts of many individuals ...

Okay

Which may also happen on Second Halvings Day and Third Halvings Day, etc. My feeling is that subsequent Halvings Days will become a lot more boring. This first one will be the most turbulent.

No, it's not like that at all. The market didn't see the halving coming and thus create ASICs to ensure it was frictionless. Second Halvings Day will be a lot more interesting because we will see if people are forced to drop out, or if the reduction in inflation will keep all miners profitable. In this case, we won't see much because some miners who can afford it are switching to a technology that is 40x better.

A few are.  There isn't a rush to the exits though, from what I can tell.


Thirty days left, target currently shows early in the day on the 29th.  For it to drop to December there would have to be a pretty big drop. 


It looks like halving will occur before any BFLs arrive in anyone's hands.   Maybe the early shipment to the testers, but even if they ship that last week of November, that's nothing that would cut short the adjustment period much more than a day or two.

So, in western hemisphere timezones, this could come as quickly as Tuesday the 27th or in Asian timezones it could still end up occurring late Thursday the 29th (barring any unexpected swings in the hash rate).

This is a week after Thanksgiving, so that won't interfere.

Who'll be the first to book a table for the first ever halving celebration?

It's as if the market knew the halving was coming? 

Yup, that target date ... still Nov 30th (Friday), but early in the day (UTC), so even a small increase will cause it to land early, like on the 29th (Thursday)

 - http://bitcoinclock.com/

So if there are any halving day events ... for party planning it is looking like it perhaps might occur Wednesday in the U.S., Thursday in Europe / Asia.

There still are some wildcards though ... GPU miners could start liquidating in larger numbers soon, trying to get a jump on others who will mine until the is no question that GPU mining's days are oover.  This loss of hashing capacity could push the date later, maybe to December again.   Or a first run for some ASICs could pull us ahead by several days, like to the 25th or earlier.

11/30/2012

You seem to be disappointed by this.

I think that the ASIC thing is kind of unfortunately timed. I would have liked to have seen what would happen if there was no transition in technology at the time. What if the halving occurred and mining was only at a 10% profit margin, suddenly putting everyone in the red by 40%? How would the market react? How would the miners react? But the conditions here are actually a little uninteresting. The price/bitcoin is so high that even a halving will keep GPUs slightly profitable, while ASICs start to roll out and will get acquired to fit into the limits of the 25 btc reward. This "First Halvings Day" will be relatively without any drama. I don't think it will give an accurate picture of what will happen when we go from 25->12.5.

I'm seeing the event referred to as "Halving Day".

What sucks is that the specific day isn't known ... and likely won't even be known with any degree of certainty of +/- 24 hours accuracy until maybe within a week of it happening.

Well, this last one was just over 13 days, but still enough to pull the date for block 210,000 to a November date ... November 30th!

Fortunately for GPU miners, the exchange rate has been rising too, so profitability is still pretty good:




 - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmc

 - http://blockchain.info/charts/miners-operating-profit-margin

I am not interesting in betting on this (Bitcoin is a big enough gamble for me right now) but I would like to continue exploring this discussion more. 

Let’s assume that BFL does begin shipments by the week of November 12 or sooner.  I toss this date out as a reasonable guess because of allot of real world factors that will force them to do something on or before this date.  Now they plan to offer a systematic approach to delivery that will take them out to the end of December to get all pre-orders out.  That is significant amount of equipment hitting the street in a short amount of time.  This act alone will cause difficulty to go up one would think.  Also keep in mind that many BFL equipment users now will need to ship their equipment back so we could see all kinds of volume changes for about a month or so. 

Now this post has listed December 2nd as the proposed day we go from 50 to 25 so that should or could cause difficulty to go down due to smaller operations dropping off. 

These two acts alone should not cancel each other out because the proposed BFL ASIC product is so significant that difficulty will jump even as large numbers of folks go to other currencies to use their equipment.

Other ASIC solutions will come online cause the difficulty to rise but not too much since the masses have purchased BFL and will not be cash positive to explore investing in other equipment.   Late comers will consider the alternatives for many reasons so their products will come online after the New Year starts.

Now the real odd question to all of this is the price per BTC.  If this jumps up higher who knows but if it drops due to fewer folks mining/using the coins this could cause a whole host of additional outcomes. 

All I can say is that starting in October to February it is going to be some wild times in this Bitcoin world. 
I would love more input to this because this is my opinion and I am trying to get as many factors ironed out as possible but one man’s point of view is what it is. 

The switch to 25BTC/block is gonna bring a lot of change to the network, especially considering ASIC miners will start trickling in at the same time. I started a bet http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=673 for whether the difficulty will go up or down after the switch. It's a really difficult question because the ASIC miners will bring it up, while FPGA/GPU miners will be leaving en masse. what do you reckon? Take a bet.

same here. Satoshi is so good. +1

If the majority of pool-ops implement the rule, they have >51% and it is irrelevant what the rest of the network thinks of it.

EDITed because of what DeathAndTaxes said above.


Wow, I really didn't think this through. Thanks for pointing this out, deathandtaxes.

December 1st!