Topic: Don't listen to all the propagandists. Mining is fine. (Read 10194 times)

It would not. The investments needed for the design and starting up fab process are enormous. The hardware unit cost may be $600, but that would not include the vast investments thrown in for R&D and setting up the production facility. It is a long term investment and I find it kinda weird how people decide to go after it as risks associated with bitcoin are rather high in long term. The bitcoin prices may collapse for a prolonged period rendering your investments useless and that would be a grand fuck up, millions of dollars thrown in the air. Unlike GPUs, noone is going to buy that hardware because it can do nothing but 2xsha256 calculations.  

Yep. I think GPUs will get overrun by ASICs eventually like CPUs got overrun by GPUs.

Fun stuff, good luck I decided not to buy a mining rig and be happy with my already existant 6870.

The thing is that even if they create a device that generates 100 MH/s for $600 but consumes lets say 25W, its going to outprice the GPU's anyway, because long time the investment will be worth it and the GPU wont be able to stay profitable at 100Mh/s at 25W. Thats a MH/J of 4, and the most efficient GPU's can only do slightly above 2. As people buy more and more of this ASIC's the difficulty go up and at some point the gpu's will generate bitcoins at a rate that wont pay for the electricity they consume.

I dont think the thread for the GPU's is pure hashing power. The problem will be power consumption efficiency.

And if it can meet the expectations.

I will laugh pretty hard if they end up spending 2 million dollars for 40GH/s or so 

The LargeCoin team seems to think they have an ASIC on the way.  Whether they really pull it off or not, is anyones's guess.  Do a search on them on the board.

The thing is that there is enough money in it now that some ASIC engineer somewhere is going to give it a try.  The question is when.

Problem is, everyone keep talking about Thash chips but so far nothing showed up, even just a theorietical project

whoops, double post

Why would someone blast out millions of dollars for nothing?




I mentioned that in my post. 1 mil isn't nearly enough to cover the initial cost of such a device.

why are you constantly referring to self interest of such party. what is the interest IS to destroy the network.

besides, they could first milk the bitcoin community for that 1 mil and then destroy it - win/win.

If these numbers are true, the whole Bitcoin system is doomed.

If one entity possesses more than 50% of the processing power, it can dominate everything because it can get wrong blocks (in their favor of course) verified simply because it has more processing power.

For example verifying some self-created "everyone sent all his bitcoins to me"-Blocks, double-spending, scamming, all you can imagine suddenly comes possible if you have access to such an amount of huge Hashing power.

On the other hand, such an endaveour would have an initial cost of millions of dollars - why would they want to wreck their own system then?

It's just something you mustn't forget.

Given that the new "über-ASIC" would dominate everything else, it could get all the 2016 Blocks for itself, netting 1.5 million $ at 15$/BTC.

But I just realized that the difficulty would explode all over the roof, so actually it isn't that bad. Not likely that the owner of this ASIC would destroy his own business before he has paid off his hardware.

Could you post your simulation so we can look at it?  I am looking at the difficulty/time spreadsheet I posted above and the 'average total hashrate' is never -4% across any trends I've seen.

I agree it would be awesome for cards to pay for themselves, and I hope mine does pay for itself.  Closing in on I think 4 bitcoins soon.  I still need 20 total to get it to pay for itself, and my math shows that won't happen.  I don't mind, but I am just saying baseless optimism is not the way to go toward BTCs.  I bought my card for gaming too, so up or down, I don't care.  However, for people that are blowing $10,000 on mining, and not understanding that the difficulty is continuing to increase in under 12 days per difficulty, they need to re-examine their calculations.


Regardless of what follows what, difficulty has been going up, quite steadily.  The next increase will likely be around 50%.  It only takes 6 such increases of 30-50% for me to no longer have an incentive to mine, because a difficulty in the range of 7Mil means my single GPU is just spinning its cycles fruitlessly.

I really hope people are objectively, and not subjectively looking at the trends, the media attention, and the numbers.

It sure seems like more cards are coming online every day, quite a while after the $30 BTC days.

I guess it's possible that not everyone gets cards mining as fast as me...but still! A couple weeks? A few weeks?

When was it last $30? That seems like forever ago.

Curiousity: Are you just wrong all the time, or are you purposefully putting out misinformation all the time? Difficulty/hashing follows price, but not immediately. That's why it's been repeatedly called a lagging indicator. It takes days/weeks for people to get their mining equipment delivered, all together, unboxed, put together, installed, up and running, stable and overclocked. The Price Jump to $30 was the biggest bitcoin had ever seen, and with a slurry of news reports inspired a huge rush of people to overextend themselves buying machines (look at beeph for example, dropping > $10,000 because bitcoin was free moniez forever!). Difficulty jumped *right* afterwards. It will jump again, THEN we will start to see price/difficulty effects as people decide whether or not its worth their investment to continue or return based on price vs. difficulty.

A side note, 2THash/sec used to be a lot, now it's 20% of the network power.

2 TERAHASHES of capacity have been added to the network just in the last 5 days. That was after Bitcoin went down in value to $17 (so much for "difficulty follows price"!)

The two difficulty decreases were long before most of us knew what a Bitcoin was.

i've done a simulation in which the average total hashrate increase rate is -4% (2nd derivation). looks awesome to me and more reasonable. maybe it actually is a good idea to keep on building rigs. i mean, you can't expect the network speed to increase at this rate for much longer. first reason, it's exponential. that means more and more investments would have to be made. but i doubt people will invest more _now_ than let's say a week ago. the average "gamer" won't buy an additional AMD card anymore just to increase his hashrate. maybe he won't mine at all (nvidia?), because the profit is not as obvious as it was in the past few weeks. there's still reasonable hope for investments to pay for themselves. i am actually thinking about getting a second card. would be so awesome to let it pay for itself and use it for gaming in a few months. crossfire :3

I thought I already went over this, but anyway. You can't use a select portion of data and claim that it is correct. Every one of those huge jumps in difficulty followed (FOLLOWED) a huge jump in price. The small stagnation of 30% was following a moderate trend up of price after a huge jump of difficulty. Difficulty has followed the money as it should. We are still in the throes of the largest price increase in bitcoins relatively short history bringing in a flux of the largest amount of miners in the history of bitcoin. It is not a coincidence that after a huge trend upwards of mining power around the the difficulty time change (lag time in buying / installing new parts) the hashrate of the networks upward trend slowed significantly. There still is inertia and this will likely cause a continuation of reasonable increase into the next difficulty due to lagtime of mining response, but unless something drastically positive happens (bitcoin price jump or something) the increase will almost certainly level out again until the next big event.

I've already told you specifically what is wrong with those spreadsheets. They enlist static numbers, based on only a very select group of data used to prove the point they are trying to make. That is called selection bias. I'm still not arguing that mining is the best thing since sliced bread, profitability is way way way down due to a number of factors, but all these projection claims that don't include the tag "btw I have no idea if my assumptions will hold true because there is not enough data to allow for any kind of reasonableness" are fallacious.

Warnings: Good. Claiming speculation as fact: Bad.

It's kind of dilemma for me. What kind of propaganda post should I put in here. Well, definitely more newcomers means less profits due to the higher difficulty. On the other hand, I have other GPU-related stuff to do and I wouldn't mind naive idiots selling their new GPUs cheap en masse.

Any advice?

But where are your numbers and spreadshits...don't you need those to be right?

Mining sucks and you guys should totally never check my signature!


Mining is fine. It's following the same trends it always has.

I've been in worse boats than this one and come out ahead...I will use the computers for Adobe in my other business if this fails...so they will make me money regardless...I have a gaming rig I have not used in 3 months (not due to bitcoin, I just got in, I have just been to busy to play).