Topic: Well the 2018 btc diff jumps are over so what will 2019 bring us? - page 25. (Read 9455 times)

I'm not sure how ownership of the powerplants is handled in China. It would be interesting if this extended to power costs. It wouldn't be a sweeping change but might eliminate the option of running some less efficient gear.

It would be interesting to know if it was common practice to provide things like tax breaks for farms, that would also be eliminated.

Thanks for bringing a touch of sanity to the discussion. As someone that has seen China ban bitcoin 54958 times since 2012, I always know its a fake story. But rarely do I get to see the real story.

As always, FUD folks seem to be ignoring what is actually being said and instead focus on their opinion of what is said.

The China's National Development and Reform Commission has NOT said BTC could be banned. What they said is, "If the move is approved, local governments in China will be prohibited from supporting makers of Bitcoin and other digital currencies through subsidies or other benefits."

Not giving tax breaks or subsidies is very different from banning something.

Partially correct because we still have to see China actually banning bitcoin .

They have somewhat banned exchanges, they might ban businesses that are focused on mining as I doubt they will go after home users but they will not ban usage. Not at the pace, they have shown n the last years.

Also, NYT strikes again...
China, a Major Bitcoin Source, Considers Moving Against It
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/09/business/bitcoin-china-ban.html

The article sounds like we might see a cut in BTC production .

But still, the difficulty doesn't seem to care about anything, not the price, nor the "ban".


1% is less than some serious luck can change the prediction.

China news : https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-cryptocurrency/china-says-it-wants-to-eliminate-bitcoin-mining-idUSKCN1RL0C4

Maybe FUD, not the first time BTC have been banned

rainy season (monsoons) in china is about there, April and May should have some spikes in difficulty, hydroelectricity  rates are dirt cheap in a few provinces in china now about 0.1 rmb per kwh that's less than 1.5 cents so i think some old gears might start kicking in.

@ yankees it is an amazing number.  It is early but it looks like a large farm has shut down.


This drop is too big!

Well we are only into this jump about 16 hours.

But  a 20 % rise in coin price followed by a 0% diff then -15% diff drop is too good to be true.

Something is up.

What is really interesting is the numbers for the first 12 hours of this jump.
We are down by more then 6%.

I've always assumed on the way up it would take us 2-3 Difficulty adjustments to feel the effects of a significant price increase. I think the difference between where we are now and where we were then is just that, we are on the way up right now. This has a couple of obstacles to overcome:

1 - A lot of the equipment probably needs to be set up again. I don't imagine many farms just left everything connected hoping to turn it back on. Especially with steadily improved gear having been available since October 2018
2- Do they still have the equipment. I've seen a lot of hardware up for sale usually in the 100's or 1000's of pieces. If no one bought it to make a go in very low cost power regions it is still likely palatalized in a warehouse.
3- Are they still operational. We have seen a few companies struggle or fold since January 2018. In the meantime, they aren't being replaced in the same regions at the same rates so these spaces just might not exist at the moment.

Coming into the peak hashrate we were also still holding steady above 6k USD. So some of these locations may have been holding off at pulling the pin in operations. Especially with the odd spike showing promise the price might stabilize there. It obviously didn't forcing some tough decisions.

Even without the price movement the new hardware being released is going to push the network hashrate and difficulty up past that peak hashrate. Probably by mid September maybe into October, just depends on how much hardware is released each batch.

It seems to suggest that equipment can't just be turned on so easily.

The good news is with 8 or 9 to go.

8 due to the bug   we are very close to 0%  So worst case is we smoke the last 8 in 15 minutes and do about +1%

Best case is we get some really long blocks 1 hour plus  and drop to -2%

Considering coins jumped close to 20 % 4100 to 5000  the last 2 weeks were very good to us miners.

Well, it would be described as: the implementation uses only 2015 of the 2016 blocks per diff change to calculate the new diff.
Technically it's a bug (by satoshi), but it's the rule in effect since the start and would be a hard fork to change it, so it will probably never change.

Edit: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/pow.cpp#L41

Edit2: an older version https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/v0.9.2rc2/src/main.cpp#L1260
that matches what appears to be the original code:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blame/5b721607b1057df4dfe97f80d235ed372312f398/main.cpp#L840

12 blocks left


A shot at 0% nice.

Well  some guesses would be  large farms surrendered and gave up the ghost.

And many people at 10 cent power or higher  can't justify it.

at lowest braiins setting the s9 does 10000 at 810 watts which loses about 1 cent a day at 10 cent power.

The mighty m10 set to 21 th doing 1265 watts earns 1.03 a day at 10 cent power.
The s15 set to lowest power does 19th at 910 watts earns about 1.28 a day  at 10 cent power

So basically every miner over 10 cents is still out of the game.

Four days since the price jump and the hashrate estimates haven't moved an inch from before April 1st.


This, in my opinion, means that:
- people who have enough energy available don't have spare equipment (previously cost prohibitive) to put it online
- the abandoned inefficient equipment from small miners, even with 20% revenue increase is still not attractive
- the number of s9 and other semi-efficient gear that has been put offline and can be turned back is insignificant compared to the gear online
- new and more efficient gear sales are down and not making a dent

I guess this is pretty logic but...what I don't understand is what has happened with that 8 exahash of mining power from the peak in October
It is safe to assume that close to 1/5 of the mining gear back then is still unprofitable to mine below 6k?

Well  it will be easy to get this answer as coins are at 5038  and diff  has not moved much at all.  Which indicates you are correct.

case in point


the above makes your post look very good.

it also is nice for me as a miner.

As I've read more interviews of execs & attended more talks/pitches in the mining industry I've found that quite a few public faces really don't know what they are doing. I imagine this is counterbalanced by all the competent miners that stay quiet, maybe not. I think a lot of dormant hash rate is the incompetent people who've switched off machines because of poor planning rather than those mining on the lower switch. This distinction is important because in the latter case (the case you mention) hash rate can go up 36% in a minute whereas in my projection it takes quite some time to get hooked back up when profitable.

Do you really think so many miners are on this lower hashrate setting? My thinking is backed by my somewhat researched opinion that the competent miners also have <5 cents & are the majority of the network & and so are still mostly chugging a way full hog, at this price/difficulty. The loss of hashrate is all in unplugged machines & not underjuiced one, I think.

Day by day  is for action more then anything else.
long term charts from last March clearly show what has happened. Net work was flooded by bitmain's sales of the cheap s9's  till diff and price crashed.  Yes I know  prices were dropping  but bitmain simply fueled the fire by dumping s9's cheaply.

my day to day interest is more peaked then it used to be due to the many s9's on the market that can be switch from 9.5 th to 13.0 th in under 1 minute.

I run the trends a long time  when I see a trend about to happen.  I started the first of these 2 threads on oct 4 2018  which was the highest diff ever.

we are yet to reach that number.  But we all know  with better gear and a bounce in price we will go higher in diff.

I was of the opinion it may be very quick since s9's can go from 9.5 to 13.5 quickly.

below is a 13 month chart from bitcoinwisdom

You can't tell the diff change in a day or even 3 days.
A single day of blocks it purely random noise.
A few days of blocks is still pretty random.
Even the 2016 block diff change is an estimate and not very reliable.

The difficulty calculations on ALL sites are ALL based on blocks found - and blocks found are random.

e.g. what is the chance that a day of blocks will be 5% faster than expected but the network hash rate hasn't changed at all:
expected = ~144
5% faster = ~151
So what's the chance of getting 151 blocks average 95% diff?
CDF[Erl] 151 0.95 gives: 0.274871 so it's not rare.

Price went up 4050 to 5050 in a day on coinbase  a 24% jump  diff is up under 1 %

My current theory is diff can jump up really fast due to firmware hashrate settings.

I have 11 s9's set at 9500 hash and can set them to 13000 hash in less then 15 minutes

I am just one of many that can do this.  Lets see if hash jumps up quickly the next 3 days or so.