Topic: Is it possible that number of miners will decrease for a while? (Read 702 times)

That depends on some factors and what kind of miners you mean. There is a rise in the number of people who mine at home at the moment and that's why GTX1080, RX580 and others are pricy lately. But, when more people join the mining process, the higher the difficulty gets. But, average Joe can only buy miners and GPUs that companies manufacture and here we will the declining number of "at home" miners. Companies like Bitmain, BitFury and others will manufacture better equipment for them (everyone knows how shady Bitmain is), on another hand, mining has turned into commercial business, so, the number of miners will decrease.

It will definitely be in the nearest future. At present, the strength it take to mine Bitcoin has increased drastically compared to these days when Bitcoin was just 2-5 years of age, there is a higher possibility that when things get harder in Bitcoin mining thousands miners won't be able to make their ways up there in terms of mining Bitcoin.

In my opinion, it is really a big possibility that many small scale miners will stop mining, specially if the cost of mining the bitcoin is higher than the profit one would get in selling it. Also if there is no good bitcoin infrastracture within the area so one can sell their bitcoins to fiat currency and use that to pay for the equipment and the electricity, then rest assured even the bigger mining operation will cease. Hopefully it will be good in the near future.

what is the break even point for miners considered now? I know the cost of electricity is a big variable, but  at 20K+ most would be still be positive?  does that mean more miners are entering the market?

Time will come that there will be fewer miners since each year it is getting harder and harder to mine Bitcoin. We all know that it cost a lot to mine and the supply is getting lesser. If a miner has complete set, they can sustain to continue. There is fewer reward miners are getting each year, the only way to avoid lesser reward is to change the coin they are mining. Small miners tend to choose another coin since bitcoin is giving lesser reward compared to other coin.

Maybe this would just call for some miners to look for a way to upgrade their current setup's since even though the number of blocks being mined is increasing, the need for more Bitcoin is also needed since this is the way that they will gain profit. They will have to sacrifice some time to at least get an upgrade if they want a better profit and I guess that would be the decisions of most users with mining equipment.

Most likely this is going to be so in the future unless the price of Bitcoin is really soaring to make it still valuable to mine bitcoins. The cost involve needed to set up a mining rig is very high and if the price of bitcoin does not move along with it in the future some miners would definitely have to drop out since they can't keep up with the cost involved.

That’s the whole point here. Halving is not first time now and miners already know how they can get the profits, by waiting and turning the purchase-to-cost ratio upside down.

For small miners this is the only option and for mega miners they will survive with block reward itself considering the high value of btc right now.

If we are describing normal situation (not a china mining ban or maybe cataclysm) i dont think that we can see significant miners quantity drop. They will rather swtich to another currency

Yes man that's true. If the price doesn't increase, then the space won't accommodate small miners who can't keep up with the expenses of mining. I even read an article that some old miners are no longer able to mine Bitcoin, which means that the miners will have to throw those away, because they are now a piece of junk. When these miners drop out it might affect the market a little bit, the price will drop to an extent, and when demand starts increasing again then it will go up and be able to cover up the expenses for these miners.

Anything may happen. As of now, new people who think about starting mining business, might go for buying bitcoins rather than mining. Existing miners may go for cost cutting like they may not sell more number of rewarded bitcoins but only the rewards which will cover their running costs of mining process. So, everything may work in the same direction which means rise of bitcoin prices in very short periods.

if the price continues to be at this time, the Bitcoin miner will decrease...
the division of the reduced reward block is not good for small miners. and actually a small Bitcoin miner doesn't need to bother thinking about this, all they have to do is change the coins they mine and their problems are over cmiiw.

Theoretically, The number of miners will decrease. The reason is because when you own a mining farm as a business but you discover that your profit is far less than your expenditure, It is either you shutdown the business or look for a way to lessen your expenditure in such a way that your profit is greater than your expenditure. Decreasing miners reward will make some of them stop mining and venture into another business or look for a way to further reduce the cost. For instance, using renewable energy to generate electricity to mitigate electricity cost. This thread here https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=14.0 will further enlightened you about some of the challenges the miners are facing especially at this moment

Yes, it's totally possible.
Because of the halving, the reward after each block is highly decreased. Too many Bitcoin miners will leave the mining world completely and some others will wait for the new devices. that's why number of miners will decrease temporary and just for a while. However after the release of new generation devices they will come back.

Generally majority has that perception that the halving will affect the reward and also believed that most miners will drop for a while but with my observation and the current rise in the price of Bitcoin, I doubt if the halving will have that much effect on miners as the price of Bitcoin recently is encouraging and majority will still stick to mining

Maybe that would happen, or maybe it will not. The price has been going up recently after the halving, and if it should increase, then the miners will continue with their mining and be able to cover up for their expenses.

When there will be a problem is if the price should keep declining instead of increasing, then a lot of miners will have to quit and wait till things get better before they will get back. And if these miners should drop out, it might have some effect on the cryptocurrency market and the price might fall. I don't really hope for that to happen.

Mining with a less block than usual is going to rip off the small miners, they cannot run simultaneously with the bigger ones that has a latest devices for mining. What the new hardware for mining has an added energy consuming efficiency which is needed right now because of a high electricity rates that we have. I don't think from now on, there are still small miners that is mining bitcoin or they are still trying and testing so they can calculate the expenses and generated income.

And it is a need for them to push through and new mining machine in order (ideally)to survive otherwise, they will lose the competition. It is to find that the more mining industry grows, the more they compete with each other and that who acquire the higher power machine will absolutely get the rewards. But unfortunately, they got the problem with their expense as it possibly will increase.  
If this only the reason to put them on the work, those small scale miners will collapse.  

Beginners didn’t really join in independently mining. But it is natural that a certain number of miners are likely to turn off.

Perhaps, if they are still getting profits, they will still continue mining, but I am pretty sure that hardware impacts their decisions as well, according to this article: Mining rigs that are old enough, isn't as effective as those that are new, built more efficiently. This means that these mining rigs aren't gaining profit because of the huge consumption of electricity, unless, if there is free electricity. In addition, bitcoin rewards decreases significantly, pushing the miners away and it is really happening.

if you imageing the hashrate as
140exa|/\/\/\/\
080exa|XXXXX
000exa|XXXXX

the group of variable miners at ~90-140exa(/\) are the hobby miners that only mine when its profitable. they bought equipment at retail prices and pay domestic electric prices
the group of fixed miners at 0-80exa(X) are the mining farms. they always mine no matter what. they create miners at wholesale/manufacturing price and buy electric allocations in bulk from the grid cheaper.

if we start to see the hashrate drop below 80-90exa then that means even the mining farmers cant cope.. i dont see that happening. they already paid their bills so they can last a lot longer until their next contract(facility lease and electric auction) so i dont see it dropping below 80xa again.
they after all have to mine. as the electric costs are already paid for and they now have to mine to be able to stock up on coins to buy the next years batch

hobby miners however have to mine to instantly sell to pay their weekly/monthly bills. so they will always be more variable and more reactive

Probably it is possible because we all know that mining is much more expensive compared to the bitcoin's price that can be cheaper due to the halving effect. Many miners will surely invest in using crypto instead of mining because the incentives are also important. It will not be profitable for them as they see that costs in mining will become more higher compared to the mining costs before halving. It will surely give you lesser amount of profit and that will make you lose the advantages of mining. I know that many former miners will invest in bitcoins because they will see that it is much more profitable than mining. That's a good option and choice to do, investing in cryptocurrency will really make you more comfortable with your business and work.

Believe most expert opinions out there points to a few observable trends and predictions:

1) Mining operations will fall after the halvening (some reports has indicated around 30% has already shuttered - especially those on older antminers)
2) For mining operations to continue, the price needs to be stable at above US$10,000, or thereabouts, depending on other factors below
3) Mining operations using newer equipment (that has lower wattage use and a larger hashing rate) would be able to make a profit (albeit smaller now)
4) Mining operators would be forced to join resources to spread out liabilities and risks (Especially when it heads towards subsequent halvening)
5) Mining operators in countries with low electricity cost, high security, and minimal government intervention will survive
6) Probably only if technology progresses quickly enough would there be opportunity for mining operations to thrive
7) Government subsidies (if any) also poses an avenue for mining operations to survive
In the future (not too far from now), when all the bitcoins are mined, all operations will seize/close down except for the largest mining pool to process transactions (by then, with the monopoly in place, transaction fees will be high)

The good news is, as we continue to mine, the BTC prices will fluctuate less, and the rarity factor will soon make the price rise due to demand and hopefully attain its full market capitalization potential.

Those who have a small number of miners might be forced to stop mining since the block reward had been reduced by two. Mining will not be sustainable if you will have a small number of miners, so I guess those who have big farms will only be left mining bitcoin. A huge decline on the number of miners is possible to occur.

That's right a few miners will leave mining, because the rewards are reduced while the cost is still same. Make mining not profitable anymore.
This is very heavy for small miners who before halving profits are small, for big miners there may be some that are still running. Actually, if the
price of bitcoin can rise dramatically, the rewards obtained can cover costs. Then small miners can survive. The problem is now the price of bitcoin
hasn't gone up and it still looks stable.

I'm pretty sure there will be a decline in the number of miners as the mining industry players have been complaining for long about low profit earnings for so long owing to the fact that the resources requirement for minig  is costlier than the profit yield margin and that's why we've seen mining turn to such a bit monopolized market by mining giant companies. So getting half reward without any price increase to the value of bitcoin will surely make a lot of miners abandon mining

I am expecting some miners shutting down the machines until the price starts rallying, but i am not certain about the break even point for miners for them to shell out money from their pocket, suppose the break even is not that great most of them will wait till the market moves higher, but big farm houses does not usually cares about having minor losses as they are certain that the market would bounce like it used to do in the past.

I don't think so it's a good logic that some miners will be left because of not expected value of btc after halving. There are many giant company mine btc and don't you think they can hold recent rewarded btc for better value for future. But if we would talk about small miners then it would be possible. But as i said before in my opinion it's not a good idea to leaving mining because of recent value cause we can all assume that how much far can go btc price.

If reward from mining decrease little maybe miner will leave crypto and keep going on with good project by investing and trading than have buy mining tools with higher price, but if bitcoin reward higher for miner they will keep continue for mining.

Block generation sped up overnight. Now we've seen 135 blocks in 1365 minutes, which is just over 10 minutes per block.


The difficulty adjusts every 2016 blocks. It's only "automatic" as long as miners keep mining.

Not only the small farms will be affected on this halving, but we can also say the miners will get the half of the reward while the energy cost is the same, this factor will make a lot of miners inefficient, and it will be cheaper to turn them off than pay from your pocket the maintenance cost.

Yes, I think so. The miners who have low hashrate will decrease during the halving because the process to mine will need a big hashrate to find the block. But if the bitcoin price can increase up to $10k-$15k, perhaps, they can start mining again, but I don't think that they can get a big reward or they can find the new block. But I don't know much about that since I don't mine bitcoin anymore. Perhaps, the miners will search for the other coins to mine because they don't have a big hashrate to mining.

If you check in the past, the miners were running the machines when the price was around $200 and the general price of things, especially the hardware and electricity has not increased considerably in the past 5 years and now the price of bitcoin is over $8800, so you can compare that and come to a conclusion. The small mining farms might have a difficult time maintaining everything because of the rise in difficulty but the big farms will always sustain.

Yeah, the only way to keep mining after halving is to buy updated equipment and find a cheaper source of electricity. Well this is a disaster to small miners they are forced to buy new devices, yet they cannot sell their old equipment in such reasonable price since it is degraded by now. On the bright side, they can focus on mining different coins but it comes with a lower reward compare to what they are getting with bitcoin. The competition in mining now has raised the level by bitcoin's protocol this is how good that coin is.

what you mean may rise or fall ?  electric cost had never been lowered but its possible that they will be highered the longer the days have been running because the cost for materials and labor are also getting expensive  .

still there are places that electricity are not really expensive so i think miners on these area wont care too much  about the halving   .  my question is that how do we know what the number of miners are decreasing or not  , is there a tool to detect that  ?  

Mann, if you see the BCH mining activity it goes skyrocket after the halving! I am sure that many bitcoin miners are mining other coin now cause of the halving. Lot of small time miners will transfer and going to mine other coin and maybe they are going back to bitcoin if the price goes up and it will be profitable again. But yeah, after I see the BCH mining activity and the sudden increase of miners of that coin, I am sure that most of them are mining bitcoin before the halving.

It is very possible and it has been happening.

The cost may rise or fall. The main cost there is the regular or non-stop electricity that miners need. But that is not something they cannot do anything about. They have certain options to counter it. But as to whether they will continue surviving with a profit despite the just implemented inflation of rewards, they will see in the next month or two.

Most miners are kind of investors, they invest because they have profit from mining. No one would mine if they had loss from it. If the price goes below, I'm sure we will see less number of miners in the chain. This may give you a good idea about it- https://tokeneo.com/bitcoins-hashrate-has-fallen-by-40-this-month-btc-miners-to-capitulate/

I dont think there's a way to find cheaper electricity but there is always a new mining machine that suitable that makes miners didn't give up.

In OP question, yes, it is possible for small miners may not afford the expenses for s short period of time and the same as what happened in the previous halving. The mere fact that small miners will stop mining it is possible that through this it may help pump up the bitcoin's price because of the low availability of bitcoins in the market. Anyway, once the Bitcoin price pump again then rest assure small miners will go back and start mining again aside from those big mining companies.

Anyone knows with what bitcoin price / hardware / electricity cost it has become unprofitable to mine after yesterdays halving ?

Aftermarket gonna be filled with used, but still in good shape (or almost new) hardware. I'm going to make a PC upgrade and is planning to buy a GPU unit from a miner that cant afford to mine since today. What do you think, should I buy GPU from a miner that bought hardware, lets say few months ago, but due to 2020 halving turn off his mining rig ?

Cheaper electricity and new mining hardware to be able to cope with the difficulty. It make me think as well that if it's no longer profitable to mine bitcoin, there is also a possibility that they could mine other altcoins as well just to be make profit out of their old and outdated mining equipments. And if bitcoin price rises, then they switch back to bitcoin. I'm not sure what will be the price today for miners to at least break even though. So there are a lot of pressure now for miners, to sell their coins in order to  buy new equipment. Or probably it already happened.

I agree that if each bitcoin block reward were halved and the price did not rise, many miners would not make a profit or even lose money. Which would force them to give up mining until the price increase or they  find cheaper electricity to keep them from losing money.

Many people forget that the BTC miners are making their revenue out of the transaction fees from transactions that were executed on the blockchain.The block rewards are just additional revenue for them.
The mining reward might be reduced,but the transaction fees remain as a relatively stable source of income.TX fees on the Bitcoin core blockchain might go up,like they did in the winter of 2017-2018.
Smaller miners will leave the mining industry for sure.The bigger miners will have to improve their efficiency and move their facilities to places that have cheaper electricity.

If there are no profit margin for the miners, then obviously they will stop simply as that.

Specially those who are mining old and inefficient mining hardware as they curtail higher electricity cost.
Of course if the price spike around the 5 digits, maybe some miners with old rigs with continue, but we can't really see where the price will be so we should expect that the pressure are strong that there's no way for them but to close and shut it down for good.

Mining today is a business, if you can't find cheap electricity then you can't survived in this game. It's just a question of how much hash-rate will come offline post halving.

This is very possible, especially the miners with low hash rates. The only thing that could inspire them to continue is spike in BTC price and hope (hoping that the ones they are mining today would cost a fortune later in the future). But I see majority of miners leaving when the cost is too much for them.

Possibly, YES. There are a lot of bitcoin miners who are willingly want to stop because of the higher cost and minimal salary in mining. If you're a managing costly businesses, you should know how to manipulate and maintain it properly so that you don't have any problem when crisis occurs.

Halving is approaching and obviously, most of us will become affected by this, we will suffer from the halving of supplies and hopefully the demand becomes high. Hoping that the price of bitcoin reach its all time high again after halving. We need to look for a brighter side because we will all benefit about it once that there's a growth in its price.

Absolutely that there's a probability that bitcoin miners will leave their work in order to invest in cryptocurrency rather than working hard and waste their time mining minimal amount of bitcoin. Sometimes all we have to do is good decision making and wise thinking.

Professional miners regularly pay high amount of electricity bills to keep their mining rig live and i don't think all of them will follow the way of "Mining for nothing". They have their initial and regular maintenance costs where due to halving they are not getting enough funds to backup all. So its simple that a big number of miners will shut down their rigs due to insufficient mining rewards and that will remain same until bitcoin's price show enough uptrend move.

As a crypto user or trader you can stay sticky with bitcoin with the idea of supporting bitcoin but its kinda different for miners. Honestly it was expected that miner will leave the field for sometime but matter of concern is the number of miners.

  

We will feel that on coming weeks. A lot of miners will think if they are gonna continue or what, cause making their profit cuts in half will really affect everything and there are factors need to consider especially expenses, you can imagine your work stays the same but your profit is reduced.

Given that, the price of bitcoin never increases, but if the price could go somewhere more than 10k then maybe they will still be interested. Compensation is a must to be able to continue mining, perhaps many already stopped and sell their equipments due to this halving.

It is really possible, we are here in this crypto world to earn money so we are looking for the bitcoin to go up so we can earn more, but it all depends on the thinking of person if he wants to earn money while the value of the bitcoin is high or he wants to earn money every time without thinking whether the price of bitcoin is down, it is a matter of thinking of different people in this crypto world. The best thing for me is to continue performing in the crypto world regardless of the value of bitcoin.
Well said, there are many people who think that way, they tend to mine only when the value of the bitcoin is high but stops it when it goes down. I am a person like that before but I realized that it is worth it mining every time regardless with the price of the bitcoin.

It's not a possibility, it's a matter of how many!

Simple basic math, the revenue is halved, the cost would have to be the same, obviously a lot of miners didn't have the cots less than half of what they were making.
You were getting 10 $, your costs were 2 $, now you're getting 5-2, still a profit.
You were getting 10 $, your costs were 6 $, now you're bleeding money so you turn off the gear.
As simple as that.


That is not a magic tool that somehow will make mining profitable again, it is designed to keep the block time, not the miner's profits. If the miners quit difficulty drops, it's tempting to go back and mine but if all do the same we're back to square one when they will again quit.
 
Let's wait and see how much of an impact this will have
630000   2020-05-11 19:23
630034   2020-05-12 02:12

That's 409 minutes for 34 blocks, 12 minutes on average!

-ck pool has just closed their doors, so it's likely that others will follow which is a pity as it gives rise to the centralised mining that bitcoin has always wanted to avoid.

Sure, but also take note that most Bitcoin miners are most likely using ASIC miners, not GPUs. So altcoins are automatically out of the equation. In the end, it comes down mostly to two choices:

1. Them mining bitcoin regardless of the losses, hoping for bitcoin to rise in price in the future.
2. Them temporarily(or permanently) turning off their miners.

Yes it's true, but miners could also still mine other Altcoins while mining BTC. Regarding in of cost in mining, Bitcoin code has a feature that automatically adjust whenever the mine block time is not reach this means if blocks is getting longer than 10 mins than the difficulty will decrease thus making miners mine faster and solved blocks and getting rewards.

Isn't the number of Bitcoin miners already going down since the bear market? Or is it rising now?
At a time when the price of BTC was already very low, while mining operational costs jumped high, many miners then took a break and chose not to continue mining again. This is done because the outcome is bigger than the income.

And after halving later, the amount of BTC that can be filtered will decrease. And there is a possibility that if it is operational normally it will rise again. If the number of coins mined decreases, the price of BTC goes down, while operational costs go up, then what is likely to happen is a reduction in the number of miners.

See. most members in this thread also consider that there will be a decrease amount of the miners after the halving. Personally I also think yes, it will decrease.  However, who knows? Crypto is sometimes full of surprise and we do not know what kind of surprise we will face in the later moment.

There's possibility that there are miners who will stop for a while because of the btc price not showing any good movement. I was thinking that the price will at least reach the 10k level but seems that the market is not responding with this halving. Let's wait for maybe another couple of weeks, and see the aftermath, whether it will change or not.

I assume you guys specifically referring to the block halving as the difficulty adjusts frequently[1], but yes, it is automatic and it already happened just hours ago. It happens after every 210,000 blocks(which is approximately every 4 years).

---

[1] https://btc.com/stats/diff

I was worried about that, I see an article before the halving event happeened who stated that the miner will be profitable if bitcoin price has a price around $10.000 when halving event has happened. So I just thinking that in this situation there will be some miner who leave their mining rig until the price of bitcoin back to high. They are an important part in bitcoin ecosystem because they have a function to validate every transaction but they will thinking to pay each cost if they turn on the mining rig to start mining bitcoin. Hopefully bitcoin price will increase again and reach new all time high.

Sorry, can you explain to a layman when the difficulty adjustments happen? I've always thought it's automatic, but can you tell me if it is?

The price is already high enough for bitcoins to be worth mining. It's just a matter of which mining operations we're talking about.

The number of miners will probably decrease, but the hash rate -- that's less of a sure thing, and didn't happen in 2016.

Inefficient miners will shut down, but efficient miners may actually be adding hash rate. Until the next difficulty adjustment comes, I don't want to make any big assumptions.

See what is important is not the number of miners but the efficiency of mining . The small miners do account for a 15-30% of the hash rate and therefore when the halving happens , they will for sure decrease for a while and therefore for a little while we will see 15-30% decrease in the hash rate making the network more vulnerable for a while.
The small miners won't be able to pay the huge electricity bills for the machine since the block reward would be literally cut in half .
Plus Miners won't actually influence the price , so people who are writing how it will decrease the price I do not think it is true , the price will be same and the only problem we will face is in the hash rate which will quickly go up since the the huge miners would be able to back it up pretty quickly . It's like more job opportunities for them .

Ofc it will decrease, but the question is by how much. I personally don't believe it will be anything significant, we had a ton of hashpower when the price was at $3,000 level and it kept growing. Perhaps the price was growing faster than the ASICS were manufactured, so the mining was never fully saturated, and halving won't cut miners in half too.

There is possibilty, if bitcoin price still go down even after the halving event then few miners would leave mining especially those are small miners. Because their production cost will not reduce, so since mining reward will be half their profits will lower than before halving. But if they expect not to sell their reward and wait for high price then likely they would continue mining and hold rewards. The problem is some countries electricity bill is quite high so they would forced to leave if there is not enough profits. However, we might see the results within couple of days. 

It will be a choice of these miners either to stop or carry-on after the bitcoin halving. Candidly speaking, those with a minimal profits would like to stop their operations due to their take home packages compared to the early days of mining Bitcoin. I would advance these miners to always put first the interest of Bitcoin than just aiming at the profits with passion. Also remember that, the value of Bitcoin will now move above the former and will now be profitable than before as time goes.

     It depends on each miner. Basically, the amount of Bitcoin mined will be halved in the same period of time. For some it can still be cost effective, with professional equipment and confidence in the potential of BTC. Others will give up. But I think most will not give up because they knew when they bought their mining equipment that BTC will be reduced by half every 4 years. Bitcoin remains a goldmine for crypto enthusiasts.

There is high possibility of it happening. Mining is a costly business to start and it also needs a good amount of recurring cost to maintain. So if bitcoin price isn't increasing now, a lot of small miners will be forced to leave mining because it will be cheaper for them to buy bitcoins from the market instead of mining it.

However, we haven't seen any signs of it. Let's keep a close watch on the situation. It seems bitcoin won't disappoint the miners.

The reward given to miners will be divided into two that is, Miners used to get rewarded with 12.5 BTC but this time it will be 6.3 BTC so the benefit is low and can discourage some low-level miners that are just new to the business and can't make enough profit out of it. Because of the electricity consumed and the number of mining hardware in their possession. It is sure to know that the people that have been mining consistently will know how to do their plus and minus. This is the third time miners reward is being divided. So people that know the business will still be available while those who are new may not be familiar and leave. Just know that some miners will drop.

Oh it's definitely possible, probably until the price goes high enough for bitcoin to be worth mining again. Especially for the small-time miners who has significantly slimmer profit margins compared to the big-time miners. In fact, this is what I assume will happen as it's the most likely one in my opinion. I don't think it's likely for bitcoin to rise in price in the short term.

With the recent halving of block rewards, the incentive will be lower than previous for miner. On the other hand, the cost for them will still be same which may not be profitable for a while (I'm not sure about this). If it is true, is it possible that some miners will just leave mining for a while until they get back in a equilibrium or in profit? What fo you think?