Topic: Life expectancy of BitCoin with difficulty increasing so fast.. (Read 2810 times)

In developed-country agriculture, when everybody has a good year farming, there's huge overproduction, a price crash, and everybody loses money.
Bitcoin mining looks to be headed that way. Because of the lag between the decision to set up a big mining operation and it going into service, the big end of the mining industry can overshoot on capacity, so that everybody loses money. Eventually, some of the players stop mining, and the market does auto-adjust itself. The way this happens is called "bankruptcy".

ASICs can improve, but not a lot more; the limits of what fabs can build are being reached. Once that happens, Bitcoin mining performance will improve at roughly the same rate as CPU performance. (This is slower than Moore's law; flash memory improves with gate density, but compute-heavy chips are heat-removal limited. That's why CPUs have clocked at roughly 3GHz for a decade.)

There's a motivation for Bitcoin mining in China that some may not have realized. It's a way to turn yuan into dollars or euros. China's exchange controls make it difficult to convert yuan to dollars. The big Bitcoin run-up in China was because, for a few months, buying Bitcoin with yuan, sending the Bitcoins outside China, and selling them for dollars was cheap, safe, and legal. Once the People's Bank of China cracked down, it stopped being cheap, safe, and legal. (China residents can't just use their debit cards to buy Bitcoins on line any more.) Hence the Bitcoin crash.

Setting up a Bitcoin mining operation in China and exporting the Bitcoins is just fine, though. China encourages manufacturing and exporting. Buying equipment with yuan and getting paid for your products in dollars is perfectly normal. That's what a Bitcoin mining operation does. So, no trouble with the authorities.

agree, but we have to wait some time
by the way, i often exchange Bitcoin on BTC, on which platform you guys exchange ?

 Well you are correct your math skills are off by a lot.
 we do not need 100k a coin for btc to work.

If btc was 6k     a   coin the new antminer s-3 would earn more then  4500 usd
If btc was 60k   a   coin the new antminer s-3 would earn more then 55500 usd
If btc was 100k a   coin the new antminer s-3 would earn more then 93300 usd

Your investment of  600 usd  would whale smoke fly levitate  etc in any of the above btc prices.

So right now in the world we live in a 1 year gain of 20% over money put in is really good..

this means turning 600 into 720 in a year.   well lets say btc is high risk. so turn 600 into  780 a 30 %  return would satisfy many people.

If btc went to 1040 usd   

 a s-3 would pay back about 790 usd 

 so 480 plus about 120 for wires psu gigabyte switch = 600 usd. 

(way less if you have all that shit from your s-1's)

So miners need a price jump of 630 to 1040  to do very well make a good 1 year profit.

Which?
If the rate of difficulty goes up 20% every period which is close to impossible without new technologies in few months, all Bitcoins won't be mined until 2140, but 20% earlier. So instead of 126 years it will take 20% less time which means 100 years=2114. In both cases you'll be dead already

roll

I'd like to understand what you mean here...are you saying we're approaching max diff?

It doesn't matter if you have a datacenter or petahashes. You are still competing with others, as long as you have cheap electricity you should be fine cause people will be shutting down their not so efficient asic soon.

The market auto-adjusts itself.

If mining isn't profitable anymore someone will stop mining, difficulty will decrease, and mining will be profitable again.

Quite easy and brilliant, I'd say.

So does anyone really know how long Bitcoin will be viable if mining is completely not worth the money or time because of the exponential increasing in difficulty??

1.3THS 6 months ago at the difficulty of just over 2 billion was yielding over $200 USD a day. Now it takes 12THS at 16+ billion difficulty to get that kind of return.

I'm not financial whiz or mathematician, but unless BitCoin goes up in value to about $100K a BTC, mining will be a wasted effort to just about everyone unless you own a datacenter and are pumping out PetaHashes of power and using some exotic power source that's not costing you a dime to use.

And what's the report that the last BitCoin will be mined in the year 2140?!?  Shit!! At the rate the difficulty keeps going up, this digital currency will be dead in 5 years or less.. The only people that will be able to afford it are the same fucking central banker types that have pretty much ruined everyone's life on this planet..