Topic: The next difficulty level will make mining unprofitable. - page 2. (Read 8868 times)

*sigh* I gotta throw more GPU power to maintain the same income now..yay for difficulty increases..

I said its gonna be 100% increase...people doubted me...now you see 

God bless Canada and its cheap electricity ! I pay max $0.07 per KwH

Over 1,000,000 bitcoins have traded on MtGox in the past 30 days. I'd say that's a very healthy amount of circulation on a single exchange. That doesn't count all the other OTC/business/etc trades that are also going on.

All good points.

The problem I see is that there's an awful lot of "should" in the bitcoin community. I'd wager most of that should is borne from hopes of profit just the same.

Lots of people with some amount of bitcoin holdings have bright ideas about what others should do in order to stabilize and legitimize said bitcoin holdings.

How many of these people are actually spending with bitcoin shops rather than simply hoarding or cashing out each day? Better yet, how many people would be willing to patronize a bitcoin business that offers the equivalent of a poor exchange rate in order to promote acceptance?

at least i can cheaply collect RMA'ed GPU's for my museum, after mining Boom/madness falloff

The future is an unknown. In order for the bitcoin price to follow difficulty - assuming 50% increases we would have to see a BTC/USD conversion of ~$20USD per BTC in 3 months. Which signals me to buy bitcoins rather then mine.

Sure it's simple supply and demand - but with the finite number of bitcoins that have been mined in active circulation - we don't have what you could call a healthy economy.

Those that point out merchants are needed are right. We need to derive a value from these coins other then mining value (which basically pins the currency to hardware/electricity costs along with the hopes/dreams of those buying the coins as an investment).

My point in the prior post is that we are hitting a critical crossroads where the seemingly rapid adoption/growth will come to a halt.

Being p2p, I agree that there needs to be an incentive to run nodes - but that incentive should come from places other then pure profit. IDEAS are the hardest thing to kill once they get going - unfortunately the bitcoin IDEA represented in these forums seems to be PROFIT.

If the system continues to exist as such, there is a good chance that it will simply written off to world history. Currency is medium of exchange, generally not an investment.  I advise anyone wishing to see this project survive to invest in companies using bitcoins (purchasing or otherwise), don't invest in bitcoins themselves.

I honestly dont care if they continue to run bitcoin mining or not, I do however believe that the bitcoin "community" is losing out on alot of "new customers" by giving out the vibe that its a "free for all - money fountain" and once that "fountain" dries out then bitcoin cease to exit(thats how alot of people seem to perceive it)

I think something must be done to correct that, I dont have the fast solution other than correcting misconceptions in threads like these.

Why is it our responsibility?  They should know how to research and read, or at least know how to ask a civilized question before chiming in about they alone can see the great Bitcoin flaw (tm).  If Bitcoin requires that everyone understand how it works in order to be adopted, it's already a failure.  But the facts are that the vast majority of people don't know or care how fiat currencies work, either.  When Bitcoin hits the mainstream, most people won't really care how Bitcoin works.  They will simply trust their geeky friend that it does work, and start using it little by little. 

Not really, this is a known-known.  The difficulty follows the price; when the price rallies, miners join the fray; and when the price falls, borderline miners drop out first.  It's a self-balancing system.  Feel free to stand around and not participate, however.  That's what I did, and I'm not bitter about missing the rally from 1.4 cents to 6.5 cents before I bought in!

I dont come here complaining about how "Its to difficult" to mine expecting something to change so I can have an better chance of mining.

The concept of difficulty increasing and mining getting more complicated and less profitable is what I want OP's like that of this thread to understand. I wont disagree with the point that bitcoinmining is profitable and holds alot of value(right now) but it helps nothing for continued growth of the bitcoin currency if majority of people strongly believe the concept ends once bitcoing mining stops being profitable.

Slowly but surely reading some of the new threads popping up I can gauge that is exactly what new "growthees" expect and those of us who know better should educate them on the other long term values of the bitcoin currency.



The above plays well into my original explaination, if we dont get new users who joined the party late interested in alternative methods to use bitcoins and still see it for having value then we might see a huge downswing of activity as soon as difficulty spike above a certain threshold which is fast approaching.

I am not against the difficulty increase as it acts like an digital accounting of some sort balancing the books of the ecurrency company but it would become a miserable time to mine if the mining community end up being the only people interested in buying/selling coins for whatever reason without any participation of all the just-laid-off bitcoin miners.

If we continue to see 50% or greater increases - it won't even pay back your electricity rates (even if you own your hardware outright) in about 60-90 days. If we continue to see the 70%+ difficulties that time frame goes down to 30-60 days.

At this point - the only support bitcoin will have for processing will be transaction fees and kids running from free electricity with their gaming rigs in their dorms/parents basement.

Anyone with a hint of clue that's trying to support/expand an operation from mining revenue will simply leave the game. Some of those will be temporary waiting for the difficulty to drop in hopes that all is not lost. Others for good.

It will be interesting to see what happens to both the network hash rate and bitcoin exchange values then!

(I should note this assume a BTC/USD exchange rate of $7USD per BTC and .09 KWh)

yeah and two weeks later $14/day
month later  $9/day
and so on

if the network keeps growing with this speed we'll need a quantum pc in a year or so

I was thinking about getting 2 5830s to throw into a spare PC, and keep that running 24/7.


Worth it after this next difficulty increase?

My only cost would be the cards, ~200 usd.

Maybe I missed it but, I don't recall seeing anyone claim entitlement. They're expecting, possibly gambling on a particular return but that's it.

The "Bitcoin isn't just about mining!" mantra, while certainly correct in a sense, is just silly.  Mining is profitable, easy and the sense that it's creating "free money" is the captivating point that fuels continued growth.

Demanding that everyone take some altruistic or academic stance on the future or health of Bitcoin is a waste of breath and potentially quite hypocritical.

It rises every 2016 blocks. If 2016 blocks come sooner than in 14 days, it will be sooner. Actually the difficulty increase=14/days_for_the_last_2106_block_since_retarget so for a 70% increase, the retarget will come in about 8 days since the last one.

I thought difficulty was supposed to rise once every two weeks, or twice a month.

Didn't it just rise like 6 days ago ?

Next:
~26 May 22:00 UTC difficulty up to ~72%

An obvious point, bitcoin isnt just about mining and people should start to consider that now even while mining is still profitable.

Its related to these posts where people feel they are entitled to $XYZ if they buy $123 of hardware for their bitcoin mining rigs.

I have no idea what point you're trying to make here.