Topic: The last month is among us.. (Read 12169 times)

I think your right,left nut 

Yes. I hope on buying a former mining GPU for cheap. I plan to use it for it's intended purpose of gaming.

I'm still a bit skeptical if BFL is really going to ship... They have been pushing back and delaying a lot. Just my opinion.

fungus among us

I have heard the 'centralizing' projection SOOOO many times but have yet to hear a persuasive argument as to what is going to cause said centralisation.  Care to elaborate?

It wasn't a serious speculation. It was an obviously thread starter to spur discussion, and anyone who got butt hurt or took it seriously should look up the definition OF speculation.

Scenario: community votes to change Bitcoin to script algorithms, rendering ASICS useless... all ASICs get sold out to the community, community votes to switch back to SHA. with the ASICS being cheap and decentralized.

Not gonna happen, but interesting thought

Good Game.

OP was so wrong its hilarious.

what do we mean by 'gg' ?

the bitcoin algorithm can be switched

in some scenarios, sha-256 ASIC hashing will congregate to a few select players effectively centralizing bitcoin creation within a few months, switching the algorithm can and will currently alleviate that

yeah, i will mine litecoin, but for bitcoin i suppose it's gg by then

Have ever heard of scrypt?

nah, we still have at least all the summer, then it's gg for sure

that was wrong

LAWL

According to that page, electricity in the country called "United States" is between 8 and 17 cents per kW/h.

I guess you better let them know about your good deal.

Is that 2 cents per kWh the price of maintaining an extension cord from your neighbor's outdoor outlet to your house? 

Maybe he lives in Bhutan[1] or some other subsidized country.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_pricing#Global_electricity_price_comparison

How does that work? You live in the "boonies" but putting miles of electric lines out to your neck of the woods makes electricity literally dirt cheap for you? 
2 cents per kWh would put you off the charts. Are you sure that price includes generation & transmission fee as well? That's usually the other 50% of your per kWh cost.

If it's really 2 cents per kWh you could have a drafty house, turn the A/C down to 70, and still pay just $100 a month for electricity. Talk about negative incentive to be energy efficient!

I think I'd leave my fridge open if electricity were that cheap...

Anyhow, pics (scan of your last elec bill -- go ahead and black out your name, etc.) or I call BS.

I pay only $.023 per kWh, and that's set to be the peak power in the middle of winter.    So I'll continue mining with my 7970s    Nice to live in the boonies with cheap power

Of course we are capable, but we do not do so on an every day basis, so as to undermine the foundations  of our basic communications. If we had to rewrite the definition of the words we used every time we had a conversation in order to accept every and all viewpoints everyone brought to the table, communication would be literally impossible (or at least improbable/burdensome).

Excepting specific case-by-case basis where there is a NEED to use common terminology in an unaccepted way, to make useful conversation we are constrained, this is why we agree to use certain words in specific ways. In the case of this thread the concept of redefining waste because it does not apply to plants is stupid and only done to serve the purpose of those who are either trolling, or for some reason seriously believe dumping toxic (to humans I now have to define) gases in unlimited quantities into our atmosphere is at worst a neutral event, and feel that "waste" is a negative propaganda term.

I still question why you would defend this viewpoint. As you mentioned yourself earlier, by viewing "waste" either as "something which is not useful to someone", or as "something which not useful to anyone", you make the word worthless, as it now applies to everything, or nothing, respectively.

Humans are perfectly capable of taking other views, for a example a more general view, like that of "earth". With such a perspective "waste" would certainly mean something different (the definition might be the same: maybe "something of no use to someone". So for a human, CO2 can be "waste", for the earth it certainly isn't. The "waste" of earth might be the radiation it is dissipating or the odd piece of man-made machinery that manages to leave its orbit.

Some (all?) plants also use oxygen if I'm not mistaken. For example underwater plants at night.

Sorry, I might got it the wrong way around, but the plants makes oxygen for their own sake, not for us.

I have no idea about what bacteria do in plants root, but I think nitrite is oxidized to nitrate. Or maybe nitrogen to nitrite.

Plants produces oxygen for the bacteria living on their roots which convert Nitrate from the soil to Nitrite, which the plant uses. The Oxygen we breathe is leaked from the soil and wasted from the plants perspective. If the plants where more effective we wouldn't be here. So no symbiosis here except that animal waste is beneficial to plants, but they can do fine without us or animals.Decomposing plant matter is fine for the bacteria to feed on.

Learning is cool 

+1

I love this discussion process.  I just went to do a little research to get my facts straight before criticising those who were saying plants metabolise CO₂ only to find my idea of metabolism was erroneous    I had been assuming the releasing of energy through the breakdown of sugars with Oxygen was metabolism whereas photosynthesis, being the creation of sugars from energy and CO₂ was not metabloism.  I discover instead both are metabolic processes, the former being catabolic (desctructive) metabolism and the latter anabolic (creative) metabolism.  Awesome

Many people assume plants only use CO₂ and through photosynthesis turn it into Oxygen whilst we animals respire turning Oxygen back into CO₂.  The point I wanted to make is that plants also respire, that they use the energy of the sun to provide them with the sugars and oxygen they need to respire.  The Oxygen released is that which is surplus to the plant's own requirements.

But reading the comments I'd intended to correct I find there was no such misconception evident there.  That 'plants metabolize CO₂' is, I now understand, correct   Thank you!

I'm sorry, but no, he is not even one iota correct, except by the most abstract approach to viewing the world. One does not just get to play semantic equivocation with definitions for no reason. This is why I asked snidely if he was a plant. As a plant, CarbonDioxide is your fuel, and Oxygen is your waste product. However, unless some things have changed, most plants do not get on the internet and make stupid little posts about coal power and post pretty and inane pictures. We are humans, and we view things from an anthrocentric perspective, and that is how we define things.

Waste has a few common definitions, depending on what is being referred to. Metabollic waste (what humans exhale), Carbon Dioxide. Then there are Waste Products, which are the unusable/unwanted materials produced as the result of a process, such as Carbon Dioxide release from burning of coal. Before anyone jumps in asks me to "prove it, I want facts not opinons", again I tell you to google it. These are not controversial statements, they are generally accepted parts of the English language. Deal with it.

Furthermore, because humans breathe out CO2, and Plants metabolize it, does not mean that everything is fine and dandy, and we can dump as much CO2 into the air as we want, becuase, hey plants love that stuff! There is a finite amount of CO2 that can be put to use by plants at any given time, just as if a million cows were dumped on every block, it's not great because we get to have steak every night.

I'm shocked that people let such juvenile arguments go by unchecked and as though they have some merit. Especially intelligent people like yourself molecular, who I've seen post helpful/useful/smart posts, should be a buffer against the nonsense. Not to put too much pressure on you of course :p

http://serason.com/projects/emccharts/countdown.php

back to the topic of the decade

Maybe the heat given off will be enough to keep some miners going through this winter. The amount saved in heating could help offset the cost of electricity. Whether or not ASIC is a myth, GPUs are coming to an end in the next 6 months.

Maybe "by-product" is the word you're looking for, rather than "waste" ?

At current difficulty and price, with $0.14 electricity I'm still profitable with both my GPU-exclusive rigs @ BTC25/block, though it's marginal. The 2x5970 1x5770 rig draws 630W for 1530MH/s, and my main desktop (which would be on 24/7 @ 90W idle anyway) draws 340W for 720MH/s. I'll probably still shut them off at the reward halving though, it's not worth the noise for $0.40 a day. I'd rather just buy BTC.

He's still correct in saying that calling it "waste" is incorrect. It's "waste" from the view of a fossil-fuel-burning power plant, for a plant, it's a "consumable" (there's probably a better word), it's part of a plants metabolism.

However by that definition: what is a "waste"?

Unless your veins run filled with chlorophyll, I'm not sure that I understand how you are advocating for more carbon dioxide. Humans need something to breathe in, in order to exhale.

fixed

yup, capitalist would be best as stateless

what kind of a definition is that, dude?

now, THAT is a good idea.

Let's make the capitalist country stateless while we're at it.

I don't think we really have a socialist country and a capitalist one.  We have one that cares about people and one that doesn't.  I haven't seen or heard anyone that is actually purposing socialism that is active in federal government (I know there are fringe groups in the US that do actually want socialism).  If people believe that we do, they may not be completely familiar with socialism.

Government programs that help people do not necessarily equate to socialism.  How those programs run would determine whether they are socialist or they are just designed to keep people from being completely down and out.  Programs to help people from being completely down and out actually benefit the capitalist notion because it enables a group of people that didn't have any money to be able to pump money back into the economy, to private businesses.

Now with that said, I do believe the US needs to reform many of their "entitlement programs" to ensure that people who are just to lazy to fill the 3 million empty jobs (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-07-25/companies-say-3-million-unfilled-positions-in-skill-crisis-jobs.html) won't just sit and home and collect money for nothing.

But yeah, labeling everything as socialism is easier than actually addressing the issue with reform that is needed while addressing the fact that in a capitalist country there is a legitimate need to help those who are down on their luck so that they can still help fuel the economy instead of doing things like resorting to crime, begging or worse suicide.

carbon dioxide is not a waste, humans exhale it and plants use it and they produce oxygen

Source to what? That coal is a ludicrously dirty fuel source? About 1 second on google will yield more results than you can reasonably shake a stick at, but ok...


CDIAC Report -- http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/emis_mon/stateemis/emis_state.html (Brief summary: More Info:
National Resource Defense Council http://www.nrdc.org/energy/coalnotclean.asp
Union of Concerned Scientists http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c02c.html emissions information (CO2, SO2, Smog contributants, Mercury, Arsenic, Cadmium)
Scientific American Article http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste Residents near coal plants are exposed to more radioactive emission than those by nuclear plants.
Peer review papers on health impacts of coal mining http://crmw.net/resources/health-impacts.php
MIT interdisciplinary study on future of coal http://web.mit.edu/coal/ Study finds coal impossible to use going forward to meet increasing energy demands due to dirty nature without CCS technology.
Whitepaper analyzing CCS http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/proceedings/01/carbon_seq/p4.pdf (Highlight, energy losses of ~25%, plus other costs for sequestration makes this unattractive at best, though it does reduce emissions substantially).

etc.

In the future feel free to do your own googling. There is no bone of contention as to the effects of coal, so this is not a point that needs to be argued and sourced, and was mostly a waste of time.

What to be done in place of coal, that is the meat for a real discussion.

we need two countries. a socialist one and a capitalist one

at this moment we have neither but we have the highly inefficient in between bullcrap

[sarcasm]No they don't.  If they did we'd all be at least millionaires by now if not qajillionairs.[/sarcasm]

Seriously though this is the reason why our country is falling apart.  Instead of having two sides that can realize they are not always right and having the ability to listen for valid comments from the other side and then compromising to reach a solution that could actually satisfy most people in the county we are left now with a bunch of grown kids kicking sand in their sandboxes claiming they are the king of the world, not willing to budge one inch.  Maybe after we get through the complete collapse we are heading to people will be willing to work together again.

You do realize that the Republicans get the say in laws?...
I guess the (R) failed.. like usual.

Source? Link? I want facts, not opinions.

Good, coal is the dirtiest source of energy we have. To suggest that is the way we should go for our energy needs is to be frank, retarded.

guess Obama failed then like usual

Coal is not sustainable in the long term whoever is in the office since it is a fossil fuel and there is only so much of it.  With that being said the prices of coal produced energy have not gone up in the 4 years that Obama has been in office while many other things have become more expensive.  So I am not sure what you mean by your statement.

Im also in Maryland and used to pay $.09 but it actually dropped the last 2 months to $.07.

coal not sustainable with Obama in that office

If you put photovoltaics on your roof in germany it'll take about 5 (roughly) years to pay off if you can sell the power at 0.35 $/kWh (!!!). The panels are expensive and the other stuff you need as well. There are sizeable costs, they're not hidden.

It might make more sense in CA or wherever there is more sun than in germany.

Well we've been at .09 /kWh since I've owned my house which is going on 8 years now.  We have a power plant using coal, a good co-op, and a solar farm in our county for power.  The co-op is actually putting in the solar power now to, as they claim, to keep the price from going up much past .09 / kWh since once the investment is done I don't think solar really costs anything in labor or other misc expenses to maintain.  But I'm not an electrical mastermind so maybe there is hidden costs in solar that I am not aware of.

What I meant was: "not sustainable in the long run" due to the underlying natural resources being limited in supply.

Why is it not sustainable.   Wholesale rates (i.e. price paid by utilities to independent power producers) in the US tend to be about $0.05 per kWh.  Throw in another $0.03 for transmission & distribution and a penny for taxes and profit.  $0.09 is perfectly sustainable for large coal plants, nuclear plants, or hydro.  

Now if you want to generate power with high cost natural gas, or renewables well that changes things but given the right energy source everyone can profit and no reason electricity needs to cost more than $0.10 (inflation adjusted of course).

The only reason power is so expensive in CA if they shutdown 3 nuclear plants early (and the state had to pay multi-billion dollar penalties to the utilities to do that which simply gets ammortized over the next decade or so in higher prices).  They prohibit building new power plants, and get most of their energy from out of state providers thus paying long haul transmission markup and premium prices.

Then you're probably guessing there are'nt many miners in Europe, either. Electricity is around 0.3 $/kWh here in germany and rising (we're stupidly shutting down all nuclear plants until 2030 and trying to substitute with wind and other regeneratives but are actually going to be substituting with fucking coal, natural gas and imports)

$0.09/kWh is ridiculous in my mind. Not sustainable at all. Higher prices coming your way sooner or later (even inflation-adjusted).

I'm guessing there aren't many miners in California.  Those prices are ridiculous.  I'm only paying .09USD /kWh here in Maryland.

location location location. This probably holds true for lots of places, Hydro cities, and what have you.

CA however is a prime counter example, with "Tiered" pricing on electricity, that rises to > $0.35USD / kWh quite quickly, and a reasonable amount of sunshine, it is quite a simple matter to break even or make hay while the sun shines so to speak on some PV investment. Off the top of my head I'm guessing even a battery system would still be cost competitive with CAs ridiculous power pricing.

under warranty? a short term miner this year, 2-6 months a falting power supply not under warranty could cost all their profit

Yes. Cooling fans are the worst, followed by power supplies.

Damn, and I just got my brand new 7950...although I got it for gaming.  I only do mining on the side when I don't use my computer.
Gets me about $50 extra a month....yay 

Keep in mind that prices change on availability and demand... with only half the output and 10x the difficulty I would expect prices rise at minimum 250% within 1-2 months! The price will most likely drop a lot immediately after the split because of all the GPU miners selling their BTC right away if they quit but will then level out...

Or you could look into ASIC alternatives like the business my colleagues and I have started! We're offering ASIC Mining Contracts at as low as 0.25 BTC that give you the full proportionate power of an ASIC without having to purchase one individually. That's nearly 125MH per contract and no worries of power! With careful reinvestment you'll have over 1GH after a year, not bad for .25BTC IMO...

Either way I recommend holding off selling your BTC and your GPUs for a while! If you'd like to see our ASIC Mining Contracts you can check out the details at our website. We are going to keep everything 100% private and confidential because of all the people that got screwed by GLBSE!

If you're interested:

Progressive Mining Contracts
http://www.progressivebtcmining.com/

Have you had any hardware failures from the hardware you started with then?

Actually, that set of calculations was made on the assumption of 25BTC block reward. With a 50BTC reward the return is better.
My mining cluster (15*5870, 4*5970, 1*6850) returns about 2.75BTC/day (about £21) for a power cost of about £10/day.
Not a huge pile of cash by any means, but... about £70/week and about 2kW of useful heat contributed to heating the house while I sit back and do nothing. I can live with that.
The hardware paid for itself long ago - I started mining in Nov 2010.

As variously pointed out, the best plan for GPU mining after the block reward drops to 25BTC depends on what you pay for power. Break-even mining is worth doing if you can use the heat. If you have night-time low cost power, push clock speeds up overnight and underclock/undervolt during the day. A mining rig with 3 5870s running at 0.95v gives about one and a half times the efficiency that it gives when running the 5870s at 1.1625v.

We will each have individual circumstances, and so each of us will have to find the right approach... which for some people will no doubt involve stopping mining, for others it might involve underclocking and undervolting. Others will order ASICs. I don't have any feel for what the value of BTC will be in a month or two. It would be nice if it doubles (I do have a few k BTC stashed in an offline wallet) but I am in no sense counting on this, thus the power measurements on underclocked GPUs.

I do not think that there will be any significant drop any time soon, if at all. If only difficulty is going to increase rather sharply (over the next 6 months I would think) once the ASIC start to be delivered.


I would be very surprised if anybody would currently be joining GPU mining. In fact overall network Hash/s rate has been very stable these past months and I would think that there is a lot of "wait & see" occurring right now. Most people are either waiting for their ASIC rigs to be delivered or keep mining before the halving and the ASIC tsunami before committing to ASIC or not. Anybody investing in GPU rigs today would most likely never amortized their investment unless you already have a rig and add few cards to beef up your system. Again, the overall network Hash/s rate indicate this is not the case.


I agree with you that this is very difficult to predict. However, there will be less BTC available, no matter what. Many people actually hoard their BTC when you look at the amount of daily exchange transactions being executed or simply use them for BTC-to-BTC transactions. In theory, price could double rather quickly following the halving. Let see what happen, this will be a very interesting time for bitcoin.

If you think solar power is free or cheap, think again: There's a reason why the german government subsidises solar power with something like €0.35/kwH. It might be a little better in places with a lot of sun, but I doubt you can produce for cheaper than what you pay (as a US-citizen) at the plug.

Also: running miners only when the sun shines is not making good use of hardware and still-low-difficulty.

I assure you: if it's not profitable to mine by buying elictricity, it is also not profitable to install photovoltaics for your miners.

I think it'll depend on whether or not the difficulty drops and by how much.  No matter how much the difficulty drops though I think those who didn't pay attention to efficiency (dropping mem clock speed, getting many cards into one motherboard, etc..) will have a hard time turning a profit.  I think this because I don't see how there is going to be a spike in BTC value vs other currencies just because the rewards are halved.  It isn't like the overall number of bitcoins dropped, just the rate they are being introduced into the economy so it isn't like each one became more valuable for any particular reason.

This is assuming that BTC value would not increase following the halving. It is possible but I would doubt this will be the case. In the end, profit is exclusively based on the BTC value versus other currencies. It is very possible that GPU miners will actually be able to make a nice profit prior to the ASIC arrival while the difficulty is still low and the BTC price increases, offsetting the reduction in BTC reward.

Let see, the next few months will be interesting in this regards.

just countin down the days :/

And that is with 50 BTC per block reward subsidy.  So the drop to 25 BTC will in an instant make mining on GPU something you can no longer do at a profit, regardless of whether your rates are daytime or nighttime, right?

I plan on keeping my quad 7970s for password cracking gaming and gaming. Or maybe I will sell two of them.. hmm..

Something a lot of people don't understand is that MHs/W does NOT = the most profit. If you doubled your power usage, but tripled your BTC earned per day, I bet it would be more profitable on a per day basis.

That is pretty high electric during the day tho. I think you're on the right track: undervolt during the day, and overclock during the night.

Hmmm... I am in the UK where power costs about £0.13 by day and £0.065 by night (7 hours out of 24)

A machine with 3 underclocked, undervolted 5970s was measured to use about 300W at the wall socket. It produced about 820MH/s.

Assuming that the difficulty doesn't change from now to block 210000 (questionable) we have:

 In 17 hours, we use 5.1kWh, costing £0.663.
 In 7 hours, we use 2.1kWh, costing £0.137.
 In 24 hours, we use 7.2kWh, costing £0.80.

 We make 0.125 Bitcoins per day, value about £0.97.

 So there is a profit there, just a very small one.

 Overnight, when the power is cheap, it is worth ruinning the 5970s at a higher voltage and clock.
 During the day, the profit is tiny, but worth keeping the machines running as it is winter - the heat has value.

http://bitcoinx.com/profit/ is also a good one.

https://bitclockers.com/calc

I wonder, with GPU's dropping off because of reward halving, if diff will substantially decrease till ASIC's make their way in. If thats the case, imagine if diff fell by 30% or more... rofl, then we'd see more gpu's coming back online till ASIC. It will be interesting to watch!

Anyone know of any calculators that allow you to change out the BTC payout rate?

I wonder if .09 /kWh still makes money after 210,000.  Time to hit up some calculators.

Fancy that, I pay 65/75 :-). I haven't found a calculator that accurately emulates what I see pooling.

You would be in the extreme minority then.

What do you pay for electricity?

I ran the numbers and find that about $0.11 per kWh is breakeven on the most efficient GPU configurations.  So unless you are paying like $0.07 per kWh or less there's no point in GPU mining after block 210,000  (unless difficulty takes a dive from other GPU miners dropping out).

I could just give away my gpu,s  and still walk away with profit so they keep burning as long as they can, my 7970,s still bring some cashback also my 6990 and 5970 are still high end cards for gamers, stockbrokers ect. even at a dumpprice, because i bought al of them 2nd hand myself win win 4 me ...

maybe i will be a little bit late IF asic,s are for real but when they are on stock (because asic fabs promises to make 900 devices a day,   ) i just buy and invest in them to.. maybe even for less money then most pre-order guys paid and i will catch up very very fast without the risk of getting riped off..and still making more BTC then most of u waiting and waiting and waiting to unbox your device wich will be wurthless if u got only 1 or 2 devices running like having 1 or 2 GPU,s running these days....  


Im pretty sure there is going to be ZERO asic,s deleverd before Christmas also...

Buy gpus for half price
mine on solar power
? ? ? ? ?
profit

GPU miners have all the time in the world to sell their cards, it is not like they are going to be irrelevant overnight. The market for these cards ranges from gamers to academics setting up GPU supercomputing and everything in between will not recede any time soon. In fact GPU miners should already have amortized their rig many many times over...

I am happily making money with GPU and will continue to do so with my GPUs until it is no longer profitable. I calculate profitability after the split with my GPUs, however I am not anticipating ASIC delivery in a timely manner or in relation to that event.

Dump at block 210,000.  Not a minute sooner, and not any later. 

Let the miners who then move on to dabble with Litecoin be the ones to sell their GPU hardware in 2013.

I can't decide whether to sell my gpus before christmas when the demand is higher or wait until the flood of gpus is off the market and the prices go back up.  Thoughts anyone?

Im pretty sure there is going to be a super flood of gpus before Christmas and that should bring the prices down for some time.

I hope GPU prices go down

They said that last month and the month before and will continue to say it for a few more months.

Things that can happen;

1) Keep my GPU,s mining or buy replacement devices called AsIc, untill today are compleet AIR units
2) A bunch of guys on this forum will get some red XXXXX through there names.

So we will see witch one it will be..very very very soon..........

i hope rates go up 

sell up ya GPUs and order some ASICS!

If they finally appear, they may have their last month a month or two later too
(so many people may join the game, making those shiny boxes decorative only :p )

ASIC is a lie 

For GPU miners, we have our last month of profitability on the menu.