Topic: Why You Haven't Seen Miners Leave in Hordes..... - page 2. (Read 7728 times)

I would.  The vast majority of botnet machines are desktops in some office, for the simple reason that those are the vast majority of PCs.  These sorts of machines rarely have GPUs with any significant amount of hashpower.

Just a guess.  But I wouldn't be surprised.

Antivirus agencies have already reported on systems being infected with GPU-mining trojans.  Since such viruses are out in the wild, who knows how many systems have been infected?  I think the last estimate was there was something like 50,000 GPU's making up the total amount of hashing power.  And there's how many computers in the world?  Several billion?  Granted, the vast vast majority of those do not have a graphics card capable of producing more than a few MH/s, but still, it wouldn't take much of a percentage of those billions of computers having a trojan to make up a decent amount of the total hashing power in the Bitcoin network.

Think about it...

1/3rd??? how do you figure that number?  that would be PR disaster for bitcoin...

Don't forget the botnets!  Since there is now malware out that can utilize a person's GPU to mine coins, I wouldn't be surprised if as much as 1/3 of all the TH/s is acquired through botnet activity.

Don't forget to report your income generating bitcoins as well.

11,2Th/s now and the drop in 2 month is of about 4Th/s, 24% less computational power or about 20000 low/medium power video cards (we are back at the levels of end of june but with a higher difficulty and a lower price).
The net is slow to adeguate the difficulty, we need at least a 10% drop in difficulty to keep the pace: if see the graphs when power grows difficulty is all the time below the actuall power, but when there is a drop difficulty stay well over:

In regards to the OP, seems miners are leaving.... noticed the network is down to an estimated 11.8 Th/s at this time..... as the post above says if its 1.4 Th/s down, thats an awful lot of GPUs :-)

spot on!

turbotax.

pretty much all ROI calculations are based on assumptions and "speculating on future"  BTC is not immune to that.
you just have to try to some close to "guessing" what reality/future will be...
variance is used to create several situations/expected outcomes and then you can use probability to pick a scenario that is most likely to happen.

I can't believe we're another 6 months into this experiment and people still don't understand that the auto-adjusting difficulty means that # of miners has absolutely nothing to do with the supply of bitcoins, thus nothing to do with the demand for bitcoins except in really indirect ways (a miner being perhaps more likely to increase demand for bitcoins by evangelizing about them or convincing a local retailer to accept them, etc)

Mining is speculation. There is no magical time frame for how long miners will hold out. They simply stay in the game as long as they believe it may be more profitable in the long run.

Mining peaked around August 1, 2011.

The mining graph has roughly the shape of the Bitcoin/USD price graph, but trails it by about two months. One interpretation of this is that miners hang on an average of two months after they start losing money, then quit.

I think the original answer for the original question is that it is still considered profitable.

One can still get a considerable amount of BTC through alternate currencies and I believe "merged mining" in a pool could make that even more profitable in the future when it comes on line.When merged mining comes online the alternate currencies should actually increase in value considering the difficulty increase.

Currently,Solidcoin is the most profitable to BTC.

Quoting your own previous fallacies does little to prove you point. People stopping to mine has nothing to do with people selling bitcoins. You still dont seem to realize that no matter how many or how few people mine, combined they accumulate exactly the same amounts of bitcoins. 50 BTC per 10 minutes. Whether that is divided by 10 miners or 10 million change nothing about the amount bitcoins they will sell. The will sell 50 BTC per 10 minutes, minus what they keep as speculation.

That in 2 or so years, only 25 BTC will be mined per 10 minutes will have 2 effects: everything else remaining equal (so ignoring a potential increase in transaction fees and especially an appreciation of bitcoins), the amount of miners will half. And admittedly, something will drop in price substantially: the price of used AMD cards. Nothing else.

here is what I said


Another cascade to follow. people stop mining, people sell, end of the world is nigh, etc. ad nauseum.

You believe the cost to produce has no bearing whatsoever. But it does. The network becomes less secure, people have less faith, etc. etc. etc. etc.


durrr but the difficulty will just decrease to compensate, jebediah!

Yeah! You're beginning to understand the relationship now !



Oh, no, you arent
I give up.

As for hashrate being stable. Really?
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-ever.png

You know whats been relatively stable? Mining profit:
http://tvori.info/bitcoin/charts/historical.png
(green line)
Just a short spike when bitcoin bubbled and people couldnt follow bringing enough mining rigs online.

yada yada yada the THash/s has been relatively stable for months now as the price has dropped like a rock. It can't go much lower than $5, or the thash/s is going to start dropping like a rock as well. Supply and demand are at relative parity. But when miners stop "demanding" new coins when the award halves, it's going to fricken crash. That's my point. They are related. I didn't say that the price only comes from the miners' cost to produce. I said it's that plus the speculation. Since there's no real demand for coins other than speculation, the price is approaching the point where it is cost to produce+ROI, but the average cost to produce is half of what people are actually paying to produce. It's dangerous and unhealthy.

miner: I DEMAND coins to sell to speculators!

it isn't one-sided, and it's a terrible economy.

Again, you got it backwards. That bitcoins are selling for $5 *is* indeed "coincidence". Or at least, its totally unrelated to the miners, but purely a result of demand, mostly speculation and some demand for commerce.

That ROI is somewhat reasonable is NOT coincidence. Not because of the price, but because the number of miners automatically adjusts to an equilibrium. You can even calculate that, its really simple. Bitcoin creation is currently fixed at 50 BTC per 10 minutes. Assume a BTC market price of $5 per BTC.

That is $250 per 10 minutes or $1500 worth of BTC per hour.

assume electricity costs $0.1 per KwH
assume everyone uses identical paid for videocards that draw 100W.

One GPU costs $0.1*0.1Kw =$0.01 per hour

So there will be an equilibrium at 150.000 GPUs.  Doesnt matter if its 2 people owning those 150K rigs, or 150K people with a single gpu. More than 150K GPUs, difficulty will increase and the miners will lose money (causing some to pull the plug). Less than 150K GPUs, difficulty will drop and they will make profit (attracting more of them).

Note how I havent used difficulty in the math. Thats because it doesnt change the equation. Difficulty level is what governs the amount of miners towards the equilibrium. If you make an assumption for hashrate, You can even calculate the resulting difficulty level if you want. its that simple.  the amount of miners adjust themselves to the price and costs, not vice versa.

Now you show me the math or even logic how changing the amount of GPUs or # of people owning them somehow influences the price of bitcoins? There is no such relationship.

It is not a coincidence that bitcoins are selling for around $5. That puts the ROI within a somewhat reasonable margin. With the silk road effect being over with, bitcoins are never going to return to $30 unless new demand is created. That means businesses need to start accepting bitcoins. Since any established business is going to realize what a joke it is, the odds of that happening are low. And if the only solution the bitcoin community can come up with is a way for businesses to immediately convert bitcoins to cash, then there is absolutely no reason for them to use bitcoin at all. And LOL no new demand is created because the coins are instantly put back on the market anyway.


I do not have the relationship backwards, I just didn't think I would have to spell it out for you that it would be a gradual process. 1 BTC will not be worth $5 if 7 billion people are mining, this should be patently obvious and helpful to draw the conclusion that the cost to miners does indeed have an affect on the price.