Topic: Miners quitting en masse -- so it begins. (Read 11391 times)

So true! 

If you visit the BOINC stats sites and check the world top 100 crunchers and their rigs, these people have crunching farms. They spend hundreds to thousands of dollars a month without any $$ returns, all for the sake of becoming #1 and staying #1. Most crunch just for the stats, but their are lots who crunch because they believe that the project can help mankind in the present or future. I crunched for World Community Grid for 5 years due to their Cancer Research projects and only stopped because of the the monthly increases of the power cost this year (about $0.01 per kwh increase a month). Like last February the power cost was only $0.18/kwh, now its $0.26/kwh (geothermal power was supposed to be cheap  . The power company even charge the cost of stolen electricity to all their consumers. Add to that cost of maintaining the rigs, just last month I lost 2 power supplies, 1 motherboard, and 1 UPS due to power outage/surges/fluctuations. Power surge strips didn't help. There's only one power company in our area so there's no choice but to accept their crappy service.

What I don't think OP realizes is two important points:

- computer hardware depreciates at an alarming rate (without bitcoins help)
- bitcoin is DESIGNED to depreciate hardware used on it (by virtue of difficulty)

So to this end, I think the future of mining is going to be in the favor of the casual home user who buys a GPU as a multi-tasker, to both play games and then mine for bitcoins while it's idle.

BUT

The exception here is that the OP is underestimating the general public's reasoning abilities. I use projects like Folding@home and SETI@home as examples. These projects are advertised to "use your computers spare cycles", without also admitting by virtue of your computer being on, it's costing you money. So every month, *@home users are donating $20-$30 to a project of their choice by proxy of their power bill.

AND THE KICKER here is that people do this for $0 in "in pocket" returns!

So as long as bitcoin can make someone $0.01 in pocket, people are going to mine. People won't necessarily INVEST in new hardware specifically to mine, but people will continue to mine.

I was afraid difficulty would keep increasing after the rally. Looks like we might get a decent decrease.

Necro-bump!

(We need a zombie smilie...)

Current difficulty: http://blockexplorer.com/q/getdifficulty
Estimate for next difficulty: http://blockexplorer.com/q/estimate

Does anyone have an idea of how the difficulty will change?because I heard rumours of a possible decrease sometime last week.I wonder if there a way to see the numbers of people quitting mining vs those that are still mining?

Who knows,the current difficulty?can they tell me?

Will I see a rise in value again or is the value just getting lower again for the bitcoins?because at somepoint I'll need to trade them in.Will there be any significant increases like we saw before the mt exchange crash in june?

You gotta remember that a lot of bitminers, myself included, are just gamers who have found a new use for their hardware.  Most of us have BFGs, not PHDs.

When I joined this forum last month, I thought the knowledge here was above average. But then I realized that is not the case. I really don't understand how majority here don't know the simple basic math behind the Bitcoin project so far and its short term future.

12 TH is only about 20.000 GPU. If we assume average miner has 2 GPU cards, (I think I'm being generous here) that's ONLY 10.000 miners so far. If we assume there is about 100.000 unique exchange accounts (I think I'm being generous again).  Out of 2bill internet users, of which lets say 500 million are online every day, 100k represents NOTHING.

There are millions of internet users that RIGHT NOW have decent radeon cards that are able to mine, but they just didn't hear about this stuff yet. By millions I'm thinking 10+ millions, not 1.35 million. At such an early stage in a pool of 10 million possible miners, computing power will easy grow at 1% or better EVERY day for a long time. Whoever doesn't understand this and accept it as a fact, has no idea how enormous the whole internet is.

The project needs to grow, and by growing there will be more and more miners. The early miners who are quitting are some what missing the bigger picture here. They have their own reasons, mainly its commercial miners who bought semi big and would now still want to get the max out of their used hardware. Which is OK. That doesn't change anything or much in the bitcoin project as a whole. We are only at 6.7mill coins out of 21mill. We need new miners and traders/speculators NOW & ALWAYS so we can keep moving forward. The thing is, system needs new miners/traders or it can stall and die, there is no future for bitcoin if same group of 100k users will trade among themselves. All we doing is making exchange owners richer, but in the end everything would go down to zero and be almost useless. The good news is, chances of this to happen are almost zero, based on the fact that there is so much unused power out there waiting to get to work.

So far the risk reward factor was big, but whoever was able to risk had a big chance to recoup that amount in a SUPER very short time. With this massive expansion in June things are starting to change and some people were caught off guard with their math and dreams that this bitcoin mining will somehow made them rich. Kinda sad but OK, people can dream.

Where to next ?

Only way is up ! Network will keep on growing, this is because so far there is only 20.000 GPU cards mining out of lets say potential 10.000.000. Of course there will be down days where network will drop for a while, but overall it will grow at a high rate. Difficulty most likely won't jump as much as it did in June anytime soon. People need to understand that even at 5-10% every 2 weeks this will grow into enormous number quick which means less and less bitcoin per user, but that is a good thing, because this way project has more chance to succeed. The bad/funny part is, it won't make YOU rich if that were your dreams pre June BOOM.

Your thread title IMPLIES that mining power is lowering.  Of course more people could be joining the mining project than people who are getting out of it, but that's not the implication of your thread title.  Your thread title makes a person immediately think "Oh, miners are quitting, hashing power is going down, the network is becoming less secure, etc etc".  No one is going to look at your thread title and say "Well, of course he only means that a few miners are quitting, and a lot more are joining!"

Oh, and thanks for resorting to personal insults because I pointed out the irony between your sensationalist thread title and the posts you are subsequently making in this thread. 

Are you really that dense?

I just explained how miners could be quitting en masse AND difficulty could go up. They are not mutually exclusive.

What if the miners who AREN'T quitting add hardware, even as several miners quit? And then there are the completely new miners...

Don't put words in my mouth. It makes you look stupid.

Oh, and didn't I say in the title of the thread, "so it begins"? That implies that it's JUST STARTING. Often times, when things happen they start out slow at first. Look at the growth of Bitcoin. It didn't happen all at once.

difficulty, i think, will have to be above 2+ million before any exodus will even start to show up.
even then you can still make a pretty decent amount of money off 1000 mh/s per day
assuming $15 per BTC. (.5 BTC per day on 1000 mh/s with 2 million difficutly).

...says the man who started the thread titled "Miners quitting en masse -- so it begins."

Currently next difficulty increase is looking to be aprox. 15%, which is due somewhere around next Tue-Wed

I actually meant to mention that (but forgot) -- it could all just be luck. But what are the chance that we're all just lucky?

It's POSSIBLE that someone will leave a $5,000 gift at my front door -- but not likely. We have to go with what's probable, not just possible.

It's more likely that hardware is being added by someone.

Network trends vary, obviously anything COULD be happening, but why not present data instead and let people come to their own conclusions?



Latest data, steady, big surge, huge drop, surge, drop. To me that mostly looks like a moderately increasing hashrate with some variance of luck. But then I guess you already knew that because you're so "quick" as you put it.

Your lack of knowledge is unfathomable.

For example, if the difficulty increases slightly, it might not be all due to "little dumb college kids who I look down my nose on because I am a mighty web designer" having their Mom buy them 5830s.

It could simply be from miners as a whole running luckier for that time period. Network hash and difficulty is just based on how many blocks are solved per hour on average, a moving average. Solving a block takes luck. We have to realize that difficulty moving up just might mean everyone mining was luckier than usual that week. Of course, right now it is likely that more hashing power is being added, but IT IS NOT A GUARANTEE. You assume way too much about everything....go write some css.

Well, "the proof is in the pudding".  When the difficulty actually resets (whenever that is, it seems to be quite the moving target at the moment) we'll see what % it goes up. That's how much capacity was added to the network -- by somebody. 

Was it a bunch of dumb kids buying 5830's for $150 and up? Was it existing miners strategically adding a card or two?  Was it larger operations following existing expansion plans? We'll probably never know.

All I know is that network capacity doesn't seem to be stopping or reversing, EVEN IF there are a lot more people selling entire operations than there were, say, 2 weeks ago.

Just because a dozen people are quitting mining doesn't mean that TWO DOZEN aren't starting up for the first time. It's possible.

Matthew

I don't think we are having huge increase of hardware joining network at this moment in time. There might be some expansion and new miners joining in but not anywhere close to additional 1/3 or so of network capacity.
Network hashing rate is not an actual number but an estimation based on speed of finding blocks, if we are finding blocks faster than average expectation then hashing rate shown higher than it actually is. Same thing as you see in pools for your own hashing speeds.

My assumption we are still at 10-11Thash/s rate based on average numbers I've seen reported by BitcoinCharts in recent times.

If you read the newbie forum, it's full of people asking if they should start investing in a mining rig now, and about 2 pages of people saying they should, I suspect this is the reason we see the increase in the network speed.

As I mentioned in another thread, people are just making this assumption that the difficulty increase has stabilised, ignoring the fact that as soon as it does, a load of people are going to go out and buy hardware.

In under a month I reckon we'll be around 3million difficulty, and in two we'll see 6 million, any one investing now really hasn't done their home work.

I WISH miners would quit en masse. Looked like hashing power was beginning to stabilize a few days ago at 10.0 TH, after the huge difficulty increase, but now it's rocketing up again.
Not sure if it's more people joining, or big business trying to take a piece of the pie.