Topic: Negative Difficulty (Difficulty DEcrease) (Read 7552 times)

btc is back up to 376 usd.  and diff is going to be very close to .5%

So with all said and done mining does not look too bad today. punch in  those numbers and s-3's look better.

Industrial mining farm are stil very profitable. Here is a nice graph user Puppet posted in several threads:

The lesson that few home miners will take away from this little human experiment in greed, is that if bitcoin was to have succeeded then the movement should have spent the greater part of its time growing the use and implementation of bitcoin around the globe. Instead the bitcoin movement has obsessed with an arms race for lions share of the hashrate and lost out to the hardware providers whom the movement created, resourced via this misguided use of peoples time and energy to create this abomination that is now the industrial mining complexes that circle the globe.

In order for miners to continue to be profitable on an operating basis they will need to have ever additional cheap electricity as difficulty increases, and this is exaggerated as the price of bitcoin goes down. Miners will also be hesistant to add additional capacity to their farms as the price of bitcoin goes down as the lower the price of bitcoin is the less of a chance they will be able to ROI on their additional investment

not since I joined a program.

Phil, you in AC playing craps to come up with that analogy?

 the idea in bold is wrong.

basically  the current diff number is a 'real number'  

 any and all hashrate numbers are guesses and estimates.  

the next diff number will be based on the time it took to do 2016 blocks (maybe 2116 as I had a beer or two tonight)     so the diff number is always a true number and hashrate is a guess based on how fast you are making blocks.

Think of it like this. box cars or a pair of sixes with dice are a diff of 35 to 1 .   So if I had 1 guy toss 1 pair of dice 10 times an hour  it will take him a while to toss  'boxcars' or 6 + 6 .     with normal luck it takes about 3.5 hours or 36 tosses to do it.

 but if that guy tossed boxcars on ten tosses in a row. he would do 10 sets of ' boxcars ' in 1 hour  .

 it would make you think they were a few more guys tossing a few more pair of dice to get that many 6 + 6 tosses in only 1 hour .

your hashrate estimate would be very high

Great thread.

So I had a chat with a 40 year veteran of the US Electric Power Industry over the weekend and based on what he was telling me, getting power in the US for under 3 cents sustained is next to impossible. You can get it in shifts, during off peak, do peak shaving and other tricks of the trade but here is the bottom line, at least in the US:

Generators will make more selling into the 'market' and to the ISO's even if it means taking generation offline. The example was that if a generator can generate power at 1 cent per Kwh and a miner came to them with a 40MW requirement and said they would pay 2 cents (100% margin), the gerator woul turn it down because they can get 7 cents per Kwh in the market someplace else. There are a bunch of other regulations that add to the reasons why buying direct can't or won't happen anytime soon.

I asked why not build a power plant and plug in a data center/mining operation into it and get a direct feed - regulation and the fact that you would need to have two generating plants for redundancy and your costs double. If you had grid tie in or wanted grid tie in to sell excess or to provide back up load, the regulations REALLY kick in and are prohibitive.

So the notion of continuous cheap power is a notion, at least in the US from what I was told, again from a guy who remembers the first NERC and FERC meetings.

The second thing I just looked at was hash rate to difficulty ratio growth for the last 6 months and the hash rate has gone up 5.5 times in the past 6 months while the difficulty has risen 4.3 times according to the data on blockchain.info I looked at. So the hash rate is growing ahead of the difficulty still, which leads me to believe that is a good thing and money can still be made but you need to go big (decimegawatt scale, 10MW at a time) and throw as much hash rate while the difficulty slips... Right?


 

Because people are still adding hash to the network.  Those with cheap electricity and cheap hardware still turn a profit even at the decreased price of BTC.

it seems an average of 5% increase, and i cant understand, how difficulty is still increasing with these btc prices.

Yes - our market is also pretty sure. The likelyhood is between 3% and 0.01% percent.
Currently you would get more than 20times your money back if you predict a decrease:

https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/difficulty-will-decrease-on-next-change/

most likely is a difficulty around 36B. That is more or less currently 50/50 if it is above or under.
https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/next-difficulty-36b/

The next diff jump should be small, I really do not see it going negative.

Already got a little cold where I am at. My power bill is gonna be going wayyyyy down with no AC running.

We're seeing the effect of how the price affects difficulty. Low price has caused people to buy fewer miners and/or turn them off. My 2 J/GH miners are idle ATM until the price goes way up or I need some heat this winter.

I'd say it's definitely possible if the price keeps decreasing.

yeah true.  if asicminer and bitmaintech can build s-3's and long tubes for cheap and pay under 3 cents a kwatt diff can go 3x before they really get hurt.

if they put a 1th on line in their mine for 150 usd it runs a profit.  even at 250 usd a coin.  I think both asic miner and bitmaintech can do the chart below in house

Not really that amazing... cheap power ($0.01-$0.03) still proves to turn a profit even if the price of BTC stays at $285 with 10% jumps.  Manufacturers with access to both cheap hardware and cheap power can continue adding gear and still make profit for quite some time yet.

amazing that people are adding gear as price is now under 300 usd.  I purchased 1 coin today. My new idea is buy a coin a day as long as price keeps dropping. I am now close to the most coins I have ever had on hand.

Looks like you were right

Looks as if your prediction is coming true.

Hash Rate    301,530,044.97 GH/s
over 50ph with a flip of a switch!

LE: now at 315,314,275.60 GH/s

I sure hope so
Otherwise were going back to the 250 dollar peak and thats really testing the waters of 2011
Means one hell of a rise though when the market gets back to snuff and adjusts from all that downward pressure.

On the bright side more hash in new gear to offset the price
Be interesting to see how the mining gear companies react to it

That's true up to a point. But miners are like speculators, they'll keep running their gear at a loss with hopes that the price of BTC will rebound.

I'm mining at a loss with BTC hovering at ~$300 but I haven't shut anything off that's 1w/GHs or less. And I'll keep running for a couple of more weeks to a month unless BTC dumps under $200... then everything goes in the trash, lol.

Jeebus, this sucks though! Please Jeebus, can we have another Thanksgiving miracle this year? 

Well price is starting to factor in now as well
We might see a decrease after all because people are starting to go offline with older gear
Off set by some new gear but maybe at a rate less than whats going off either way this will be small

Don't forget you are working with variance (luck) here, so the difficulty can change +/- 3% without any hashrate change, just by probability of finding blocks...

This is what I am talking about: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/hash-rate-spikes-and-difficulty-analysis-619438

I'm currently seeing 0% as of this moment and there are still 4 more days to go. And the block find rate is now 7.06 per hour.

It's going up.

As of 2014-10-05 02:10:00: 702 more blocks need to be found before 2014-10-09 21:18:02 for it to increased in difficulty.

4 days 19 hours 8 minutes. That's 9.84 minutes a block. or 59.04 minutes per 6 blocks. Currently we are doing 59.8 mins p[er 6 blocks over the last 504. It's going to be VERY close. A few more % in real hasrate have to be added in the last day or so to make up for it. Otherwise it's going down.

not exactly but close enough.

I suspect that they could add 20th with ease. for 3 or 4 diff jumps alone.

The problem big data center/builders have is not adding gear. it is adding fiat price to the btc itself.

I have mined  10 dollar coins in early jan of 2013 I hit the runup to 240usd in april 2013  I hit the runup to 1100 in nov 2013.  

These companies need to runup btc price not btc diff to make money.

we need to see what happens  with diff

as the btc to usd is sinking close to the 300 dollar level

Retail miners make up just a small portion of the hashrate these days. In my opinion, it's useless to use as a basis for predictions. Someone like Bitfury just has to flip the "on" switch for a new DC or two and the difficulty jumps another 20%.

but they have hashnest  and it is more then 4ph and growing.

  asicminer is selling the long tubes pretty cheap  .

which is why I can see a 1+2% jump.

580 th is nothing these days. thats <0.5% increase.

s-4's in transit from bitmaintech to  miners will come back on the network.

 more then  1 or 2 percent of the network  is in transit to new s-4 owners.

 Not talking a big gain like 10 %


look at the sales here

https://blockchain.info/address/1QB8Ds5KbGYBLQa5RyDQ2sVUeSKWf7qgkZ

I count hundreds not delivered by the dates :

 I count 72 paid for on 9-30-2014
 I count 57 paid for on 10-1-2014
 I count 25 paid for on 10-2-2014
 I count 17 paid for on 10-3-2014
 I count  8 paid for on  10-4-2014  that comes to around 180 units  that is 360th  which is not 1 or 2 percent ,

 but I think most of the sept 29th orders are not on line  brings it to  290 units of  about 580th  .   

Why do you think it will spike?

I think will will spike the last 2-3 days and go to +1 or +2 %

Betting sites have it around a 50% either way. It's going to be close.

no kidding

2016 blocks average right now suggests a -3% adjustments, and only five days to go. I'd say that yes, by now there is a pretty big chance the difficulty will actually go down. For that not to happen the hashrate needs to see a sudden increase pretty soon and sustained for the rest of the difficulty period.

No, because BFL just started his mining factory again...

It's really sad that ASICs can't do Folding@Home. We'd cure cancer in a week if we could switch our gear over to Folding instead of mining, lol.

Well a difficulty decrease isn't that bad considering Bitcoins is hitting 35 Billion right now
Some sort of stabilization might actually make mining more attractive again
Sometime in the future of course or it might slow down the arms race or perhaps central mining centers kind of tricky to tell the trend transition going on here.

All other POW coins are complete crap... or will soon become crap when the new generation of Scrypt ASICs start jacking-up the difficulty.

Mining is dead (or dying) for every coin.

so what now, mine other coins ?

No it doesn't. At least not in the short term. ASIC manufacturers have long term plans to continue to add hash capacity to their massive mining operations. We may have adjustment periods now where we don't see big jumps but they will be interrupted by frequent 10-20% difficulty adjustments.

Just wait until Bitfury brings a couple more DCs online in the near future. 

well with the price on a steady decline, it only makes sense difficulty decreases/stagnates.

Most had predicted the rise of hashrate in jumps would peak about now. I think it still has a way to go yet. Maybe by XMAS before the big players start to blink.

You are right - 15% increase has been a very good estimate so far. But I think we are all pretty sure that it will not continue. Otherwise we would have a diffuculty of 100B at the end of the year.
http://btcinvest.net/en/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php?diff=34661425924&dcosts=4995&diff_mincrease=15&blpbtc=25&dhsmhs=5400000&diff_mincreasedecrease=0.5&btcusd=453.80&dpowcon=2500&btcusd_mincrease=1&pcost=0.115&calcweeks=32&dleadtime=9&action=calc#

If you would predict that and you would be right you would get 5 times your money back:
https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/bitcoin-difficulty-100b-by-the-end-of-the-year/

Even the decrease on the next changes get more likely, currently you get 1.6 times your money back if you predict against it:
https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/difficulty-will-decrease-on-next-change/

Nah, the difficulty increases started slowing down in July, before those were delivered.

Let's take a look back at when it started:


Since the GB was opened, the difficulty increases have averaged 13.3%. 15% was a damn close estimate for more than a dozen difficulty increases.

Your comment was based on JWU42's estimate:

http://btcinvest.net/en/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php?diff=6978842650&dcosts=4995&diff_mincrease=15&blpbtc=25&dhsmhs=5400000&diff_mincreasedecrease=0.5&btcusd=453.80&dpowcon=2500&btcusd_mincrease=1&pcost=0.115&calcweeks=32&dleadtime=9&action=calc#

After 13 increases he estimated the difficulty would be 35.5 B. It is now 34.6 B. Great estimate JWU42!

Are you talking about a $ or BTC loss?

In that case: Yep, would be the first time since then (approximately May 2013 - mass introduction of the Block Erupter USB)

Modern times is since the introduction of asic chips. It'll be interestingif this is a real change or just a blip from bfls hashing ooperation going off line.

Congrats. All of your customers will now only suffer a 50% loss instead of 70%, surely something to be proud of.

Of course everyone who bought any ASIC before June has already turned a profit by now but as we know profit is irrelevant to SPtech hardware owners.

Isn't it funny that one month after my GB SP30 were delivered that the difficulty stopped? Looking back in the GB thread makes me smile at all those replies with nonstop +20% difficulty increase projections.

We're still a week away from the next difficulty increase. Yes, I said INcrease. It's not going down. Let's just call it a hunch. 

here you can watch the chances for different difficulty changes.

https://www.fairlay.com/event/category/bitcoin/difficulty/

It is still likely that the next increase will be around 3%. I don't think a decrease will happen.

Good thing you adjusted the title - no such thing as negative difficulty, of course

As for 'first in modern times', that depends on what you define as 'modern times', but the last time it happened was apparently the 25th of January, 2013.  So, quite a while ago, and it would mark only the 20th time it's happened.

The next difficulty is still many blocks away, though (1,032 at moment of refresh), so I wouldn't peg it down just yet.

Will this period be the first in modern times where the difficulty goes down?  We look to be possibly on a path to a difficulty decrease this time.  
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty