Topic: Will btc difficulty go sideways for rest of the year? - page 6. (Read 11858 times)

I don't mean to take the thread off topic. Its just that watching the mining carnage and the zero sum mining game in action, it seems like an incredible amount of financial outlay and upkeep and risk vs. just buying bitcoin.

I know you are on freeish solar so that's a different ballgame. But the upside to mining is "discounted" coins. The downside is loss. Buying bitcoin anytime since 2009 except for a handful of months in 2017 is now incredible gains, with zero maintenance or overhead.

I find these mining threads very educational as I try to understand the mentality behind them.

Stay on topic guys.



-10%  to -8% seems pretty likely.

But on any given day the missing 16,000,000,000gh could come back online  as it is out there somewhere

The diff day adjustment high for hash was 53,000,000,000gh or about 3,785,714 s9's if network was all s9's

The real high for has was around 56,000,000,000 or about 4,000,000 s9's

so the current number now is 37,500,000,000

that is a drop of 18,500,000,000 gh or 1,321,400 s9's are off line

You must love this shit, because it would be much easier to just buy bitcoin and HODL.

You hit the nail on the head here. As someone who has been doing this at an industrial level longer than most I have seen soooo many poorly designed and poorly ran datacenters pop up and die a horrible death shortly after. The only way to survive in this industry is to run very lean in all phases of operation at all times regardless of profits or how well the market is doing. What i have always done is ride the waves up by reinvesting and expanding when times are good so that when things are on the downturn you can survive by the sheer size of your operation. Most people getting into this game make a few major mistakes. Mistake 1 is build costs, the way to build is leaning on the secondary market. Electrical infrastructure has not changed much in the last 50 years, a transformer is a transformer. As an example, I picked up used 480/208 step down transformers for pennies on the dollar used while I watched other places pay tens of thousands of dollars for brand new equipment where im paying maybe 10% of what they are for used equipment that functions just as well. With over 20mw of power in use I have not had a single used transformer fail. Another thing I consider a mistake is buying PDUs new. These can easily run into the high hundreds per piece new, whereas I have over 3000 active PDUs and none of them cost over $100 thanks to the secondary market.

The second big mistake is in operational costs.

I know of 5mw datacenters with 20 technicians on staff and even with all that they still are lucky to keep a 90% uptime. I have done the exact opposite, I have a small team for a very large space but we have created efficient processes and monitoring tools in house to greatly augment the efficiency of our team. With an average of 12000 machines online I can claim (with proof) we keep an over 99% uptime with a staff of less than half a dozen. Only by keeping operational costs as low as possible and reinvesting as much as possible on the upswings can you survive here stateside. When you factor in insurance and taxes and tariffs and everything else, overall costs can stack up quickly and most people starting these datacenters with the dream of lining their own pockets will never have a sustainable business model. You survive by stacking and saving and being prepared for the volatile market conditions that are guaranteed to happen.

This is 100% correct.
I also don't like I have to KYC to buy bitcoin here from most places and I refuse to deal on Local bitcoins.

So mining even for a while at a loss I really don't think of it as a loss right now more of a investment for the future with potential of x5-x10-x?? gains.

Basically swapping something that is very abundant (FIAT) for something that is limited and rare (BTC)

and I sub to the Hal finny way of thinking.. 10 Million per bitcoin.  

http://www.metzdowd.com/pipermail/cryptography/2009-January/015004.html

Not sure he does but mining at a loss on an affordable scale is not so dumb

Ie loss of a few hunderd usd  a month for a year.  lets say  you spent 4800 this year mining and have 1 btc.

It can be in a wallet  that no one knows about but yourself  so paying  4800 for a 3900 asset is not so dumb  if it goes up to 20000 in a few years.

and you could sell the coin for 19000 cash  to a guy that has a fresh core wallet  and he now has a hidden asset.

So.. do you prefer to pay 100usd to energy company for 50 usd of BTC indeed buy directly 100usd of BTC? wow

As a comparison, LPM firmware and diff adjustments down have been keeping me just *above* break even. But there does come a point in time where simply buying BTC might be better unless you're heating your house or something.

If BTC stabilizes and chops around North of $3,500.00, I speculate we will see some marginal Hash Power come back online. I'm not expecting another whopper drop at the next jump. Of course with any new lows, that completely changes. We seem to be nearing a major shake out for many miners. That's why I think it will likely happen. Markets like to go on "seek and destroy" missions. Finding the pockets of the most pain and administering that without prejudice.

Hey I was still running my S3's.  
Those puppy's alone were sinking the juice.
I think in the long run even with running at a loss come few years who knows where the price will go, it could turn into a very nice amount.
Happy to throw some fiat away to gain some coins for the long run.

Though now at 22p it's a 100% no mine situation.

At 12.5p/kwh which is 16c/kwh you should have been out a long time ago.

At $4000 you would have been losing $3 a day per S9
At $8000 it would have been $0.45 a day loss.

we may drop 10% to 15% again which is very interesting if we do.

Frankly  with real luck  we  do a -15 say dec 16 and then a -10 jan1

which will get us down to around 33,000,000,000 gh and a diff of 4,800,000,000,000

for jan  of 2019

a diff of 4,800,000,000,000 works for around a 2500 price point for a 4 cent miner

Lot of miners suffering right now power cost being a massive factor while the diff drop is helping some I do fear the smaller mines 10-200 machines range are on the chopping block unless your supplementing with renewable energy or have a really competitive rate.  We were paying 12.5P here in the UK and we have been told we will now pay 22p via the facility resellers. :/  So we're out.

I would agree yes, quite a few farms have gone up and busted. 

I have run into three separate situations where I was buying gear from " Hosting " facilities and or Colo set ups. Each time I was shocked at how little these operations knew about basic cooling and infrastructure. Their "floor costs" or infrastructure costs were astronomical. I believe a lot of these miners that are for sale on the secondary market in US and Canada are coming from these poorly planned build outs, that just threw large amounts of capital at them without understanding the metrics of the operations. Even at the most basic level. I believe there are still many more to follow. Not only did "fast money" over speculate BTC itself, it went "All In " on Colo, Reselling of Gear and every other facet of this business. I suspect the shake out will continue until all the Wheat is separated from the Chaff.

Give yourself some credit. It's been about twelve days since the price was at best barely tapping "within 5% of 4500" margins.

Seems like as usual, I'm going to be almost entirely wrong...


It was just 15% last week but if it goes down even the minimum anticipated I'll be proven wrong again


But still, I can't really believe this is happening, I'm amazed that there was so much gear that was mining at such low-profit margins and with at least over 5 cents per kWh.

Really I need to ignore this whole mining stuff, I feel so tempted get some miners right now

widespread here  -2.6 to -18.6
the important thing to see is we are down 29 blocks
we are 25 hours in  should be 6 x 25 = 150  actual made is 121


As Agent Mulder would say "the truth is out there"

Well in the case of mining BTC the gear is out there.

Thats is why  the prediction above has a big range.  yeah we are really down  around 18%  but lots of gear could be turned back on.  So -2 or even +1 could happen.

I still see a price drop  with this downward diff movement.