So..difficulty is up to 31M already which concerns me. As someone who has a Mercury on order that I don't expect to see until October at the earliest, according to the new mining calculator at the genesis block
mining.thegenesisblock.com, things aren't looking favorable
For me, its looking like 140 days to break even, then maybe $300-$400 gain over that before losing money. I could upgrade to a Saturn but those don't look much better - Jupiters still looking decent though.
So for me, as much as I want to support KnC, I'm considering canceling strictly based on current/projected difficulty...anyone else?
I don't really think the hashrate can go up exponentially forever, unless there's a huge spike in the cost of bitcoin simply spending money to get a bigger piece of a fixed amount of bitcoin generated every day isn't going to seem like a good investment, because at a certain point all you're going to do is decrease the profit of miners overall, who will have to spend more of their coins on new hardware rather then keeping it as profit. It will mean all the profit goes to chip makers, rather then to miners.
For companies that both make Asics and mine with them, adding capacity will just start an arms race where they all have to spend a ton of money on fabricating chips to keep up with each other - they end up making less profit, because they'll be sending all their money to fabs.
On the other hand, if the price of bitcoin hits $1k, or even $10k there'll be a lot more money to spend on chips.
The ultimate end-game may be miners starting their own fabs to continuously crap out chips to keep up with the hashrate. That's also a less risky investment
I would be very pleased if the competition fell on their face between now and November, but that's just wishful thinking. I have estimated that difficulty will be at 100M by September and likely 200M by late October/early November. Until KnC has some sort of a major delay, I'll keep my order, but I am not planning on making a ton of profit.
It's not a question of falling flat, it's a question of fab lead times. Other then ASICMiner all the other companies need to take orders before they fab chips, and that means months of lead time. Unfortunately, the KnC people are on about the same clock as lots of other projects - but with bitfury and Avalon chips need to be soldered on to boards by DIYers and others before they're useable, while KnC is selling complete systems.
You can see how KnC's "single huge chip" design makes manufacture a lot easier, you just need to put one chip on a bunch of boards, and slot 1-4 boards in a box and send it, rather then placing 240 chips to make an Avalon unit, or whatever.
The other problem is that Avalon/Asicminer would need to spend millions to get a 28nm chip made.
Bitfury -few TH/s?
I disagree. Poject "100TH" will (eventually) deploy 75TH in August and 25TH later on, metabank will (eventually) deploy around 50TH until October, Bitfurystrikesback/Megabigpower will (eventually) deploy several hundred TH until the end of the year (if shipment begins in August).
100TH is only enough to make the difficulty go up by 13. That's about how much came online between may 25th and july 7th
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Of course, I should actually be discouraging everyone from mining right? So... oh yeah difficulty will 10 billion by the end of the year, don't bother buying anything, etc
