Topic: It is 2020 time for a new diff thread. - page 6. (Read 14620 times)

We just had an amazing 16% drop in difficulty and below is the current situation.


Too early to reach any sort of conclusions but judging by the fact that for about 50 blocks or 8 hours and we are at 90% pase tells me that lock-down on Xinjiang is serious and there are indeed a lot of miners that are waiting to enter, we don't know if they will eventually find their way in before the lockdown is over, or whether they will be stuck for as long as the lockdown is active.

We shall find out in a few days, a drop or no change at all will be welcomed while the price remains above $13,000.

deleted  as it is not btc

back to btc we are close to -16% a huge drop off price is over 13500.

if prices hold btc miners will do well the next 2 weeks.  btw if you mined at the right pools the last ten days you did well.  I have been paid 120% at viabtc the last 10 days.  So it comes to about 24 good days of mining btc.

More hydro is still on that's for sure, we just don't know how much of them are there, but it's safe to assume that the majority have left already, however, with prices above $13,500 and a drop of 15% will be more than good for many miners who are no unprofitable, also many auto-switching miners will move from other coins to BTC when the adjustment happens that's guaranteed.

I will be more than happy to see an increase of not more than 3% (assuming price will stay in the range), I won't mind another huge drop but it's really asking for too much, more like wishful thinking.

With that being said, if the lockdown in Xinjiang remains, we could actually see another drop because many efficient gears need to be moved from Sichuan (Hydro area) to Xinjiang, the majority of the S9s will be sent to warehouses and palletized, but many other efficient gears will go back to other regions, Xinjiang has almost half the hashrate of China, so a large percentage of the efficient gears will be going there, and of course, with the Corona lockdown they have now, the transportation process could be slowed down allowing for another drop, so let's follow Xinjiang lockdown news.

I hope more hydro is still on line if so we could get a small drop next jump of 2-4%.

We are doing better then I had hoped for. I would like a to get 2 or 3 weeks of this.

We are heading back to early Aug difficulty of 16.8T, this is HUGE.




That's a good point but really hard to prove, we don't know if actually, only 15% of the hashrate is was gone or it was 30% gone and 15% came from the new gears, also we don't know if all hydro gears went offline, or just half of them? from what I heard recently, there are a few places that still have good enough water levels that should be good for a week or two from now, I have no estimate on those, but I know they do exist, so all in all, not every hydro gear has gone offline just yet.

Well we are now creeping towards 16%.

Almost 17 day jump may happen if we trend like we just did.

As usual, when I say things are going to happen there is nothing happening, when I say no, this is not possible, the retarget is just around the corner, the block time is going down again, of course, things go the other way around. Any hope of finally nailing a prediction is fading away.


From this, we should speculate that at least 15% of the previous hash rate, if not more as probably there is still new gear being plugging in and offsetting this drop, was located in an area where there is no more cheap energy for them or at least they are moving like shepherds to their winter camp. But if we consider that miners in China make up at least 50-60% of the global hashrate it also means that more than 3/4 of them are either not affected or they are not using the rainy season and taking advantage of this, thus invalidating another theory about the percentages by regions where Sichuan was quoted to dominate. Anyhow!

Will be interesting to see what comes back online once relocation from hydro season powers back up.

Pushing 15%  we may have a 17 day jump if this continues closer to 18%

prices are 13,600+.

It's almost impossible to predict the coming epoch because:

1- We don't know if all hydropower gears already went offline.
2- Current price is pretty good and with 13% many miners will be profitable again.

I am leaning towards a slight increase rather than a drop because I think most if not all gears which run on hydropower in china are already offline, but let's wait and see.



Ya, that was a joke actually.


Next week will be good or at least much better for fees (from the users' perspective), so make sure you consolidate your inputs then.

at the moment viabtc is paying 121% per block guaranteed daily payments if you mine around 1.2 ph

They pay as low as 96.25% per block.

As a miner that is a huge swing for me. along with price up near 13,500.

Oh, I wasn't saying like 13% for this epoch, it's going to end in 3 days so there is not much room to drop even further but for what's coming next, another slight drop, maybe 2-3 or even more?  As I screwed up with my predictions so bad right now I'm feeling uneasy advancing any number on this subject. I was thinking that it's the end of the month also, maybe a few of those soon to be unprofitable miners that right now mine with cheap energy still have their power contract till the end of October so there is more to be plugged out in the next days. And yeah, blocks are slightly up, 117 in the last 24 hours.


I don't and I can't envy somebody who works hard and has ups and downs, I know how unpredictable and risky this business is, that's why I never tried to go mining again ever, not that it would be possible anyhow with our prices around here. But exactly because there the relations between everyone using or supporting bitcoin is why I said that fees are outrageous right now, a price increase that always results in higher volume in transactions, combined with a loss of capacity of 13% overall is hurting bitcoin usage, and from this, we have a domino effect that goes to price and then back to your income. That's why I was saying, grab those huge fees already, mine more blocks and get more rewards so we as users could spend again with at least 10sat/b, let's all be happy . Anyhow, the weekend is coming, there will be a difficulty retarget probably on Monday so things might get better.

Yeah I spent 9700 on gear july 1 to oct 23.

I paid 3700 back.

I could use a good two months  and drop the remaining 6k to under 2k by 2021.

You are correct, but 72% is only from within the last 104 blocks if blocks average time has been like this from the first block then we would have a difficulty drop of 100-72, but we only started going this slow recently, in other words, mining gears have been shutting down gradually not all at once, on the first day of this epoch the average block time was 9.1 mins, on 24th it was 9.4 mins, also keep in mind that new gears keep coming online as the old once leave, also the auto profit-switching algos will mine BTC for a few hours and then go to another alt and so on so forth.

in short, there is a lot of noise within the short intervals, pretty hard to tell why and how things happen.


Good point, hydropower costs about 1 cent per Kwh, coal power costs anywhere from 3.5 to 5 cents, there is no doubt that a good portion of these gears will come back online, but I got a quote for $38 per miner with PSU and that's S9i, not the old S9 which is probably below $30, that is very close to their scrap value, this drop in price suggests that many, many S9s aren't going back to "work".

However, eventually, another larger portion will be shipped overseas to countries like Malaysia, Iran, Venezuela, and many other countries that have 1 cent or less power rates, but all those countries combined can't accommodate 100% of the supply, which means a lot of S9s will sit there and do nothing, perhaps they will come back online when bitcoin price starts to hit some good levels.

With that being said, with a difficulty drop of 13-14% and bitcoin price above $13,000 I won't be surprised to see a +% change in difficulty in the next epoch.


Miners are the back-bone of Bitcoin, you should be paying high fees with a smile on your face knowing that it's going serve a greater purpose. .

All in all, as miners, we could really use the high fees and drop in difficulty for a few weeks, I have personally encountered a large loss due to investing in the 17 series mining gears from Bitmain, my timing was perfect, the plan was supposed to work out, but alas, turned out the quality was more than terrible, and a short while before that I lost a good amount of money with those S9ks, and I am not alone, most miners didn't have a good year, 2020 has been rough on us, don't envy us for having a good month or two.

Nice post, just as the one that was spot on about the rainy season, but one thing, or maybe more as another thing popped up in my mind as I was typingng. Will it be just 13%? Block time went from 12.30 to 13.09, 14.54 and 14.4. In the last 24% hours there have been 104 blocks, that's only 72% of the target. Of course, we all know, luck..but common, just bad luck for 5 days? As for the profitability all that gear that was running on dirt cheap/ free excess hydropower, is it so unprofitable that will not get back online even with just as cheap coal power? Or is this a combination of the new tariffs in Inner Mongolia, with the note that I don't have a clue how legit this news is.

But, as much as you miners enjoy this drop combined with a price increase I'm certain that a lot of people can't for this painful period to be done so we can see again blocks at a 10-minute interval, it's nearly 4 days of high fees and clogged mempool, with 150MB and 45btc in fees sitting there. Just grab it already!!!!  

True and i agree but as we see bitcoin failed many times in this week to break 14 k $ edge (3 times exactly on 30 min chart) , am afraid if bigger volume didnt enter the market we can see a huge dump on bitcoin price and also on the whole market.

Let's do a bit of analysis:

The difficulty we had before the halving was 16T, at that time the first batch of S19s was starting to ship out, which IMO was the reason why difficulty only dropped to 13.7T despite a reward reduction of 50%, in late June with a combination of the new mining gears from both Bitmain and Micro BT and the rainy season which resulted in thousands of S9s to go back online.

From June to late October we rose strong and steady from 13.7T to 19.9T which is a spike of 45%, what's interesting is this:

Late September price was at the 10k levels while difficulty was already above 19T, now we are 35% up in price but 13% of the hashrate is fading away, the question is if these guys were profitable at 10k price and 19T difficulty why leave now when the difficulty is almost the same but price is 35% higher?

The answer is simple, the 13% are old gears that are no longer profitable without the hydropower, there is no way that someone who mined with S19/S19 pro back in September would shut down now when profits are much higher!

Since we are heading back to 17T levels and assuming that this is it and we are not going to dip any further, in other words, assuming all the S9s in China are now shut-down, then we can safely assume the following is accurate:

13.7T to 17.3 T most of it came from new gears.
17.3 to   19.9T most of it came from old gears.

My estimation is 25-30EH came from new gears (Bitmain 19 and 17 series, as well as both Avalon and MicroBT new generation ) and more or less the same came from old gears, but this is still a bit too early to confirm, we will need to see how the next epoch react, and long story short, any drop in difficulty with the price above 10-11k comes from old gears going offline, when we stop dropping or start going back up then we know that all the hydro gears are gone for this year.


That's true, but the weight of those freshly mined bitcoins is nothing compared to what others can sell/buy.

any speculation about why difficulty and price are moving in such opposite directions this month? does it have to do with the end of the rainy season in china, and is that an expected phenomenon from year to year?


maybe that's fitting, since BTC price is hitting a wall right at the 2019 top. traders/whales love to paint a good double top.

But when a pool grabs 2.8 btc  in fees  due to to many blocks getting made  they can justify selling the 2.8 since the next few hundred blocks will ALL GENERATE HIGH FEES.   So if you make 10 blocks a day  and grab 25 btc in fees know tomorrow you do the same and for the next few days you do this. then sell off a lot of coins at going rate is easier to do.

It's rather amazing that at this price point that anyone would ramp down there machines with the current price but as you say this could be old gear that came online and is now taken away.

I wonder how many of the big mines actually upgraded to the latest versions of the Antminer my thoughts are a lot didn't buy they as they were concerned over the Bitmain leadership wars and late delivery and they stuck with the older machines.

Interesting times!