Quote from: MoonShadow on June 19, 2011, 12:29:26 AM

The wager can be any amount of bitcoins that you wish to commit. It's not about the amount for myself, but the fun of it.

9.3 days * 6 difficulty adjustments = 55.8 days. So make it 60 days from tomorrow, Sunday June 18th at noon Eastern time is when the bet is final.

Bet starts with the next difficulty setting the bar, but I'll lay out the difficulty over/under based upon the estimate presently on bitcoinwatch.com.

((((((1,052,445 next difficulty, estimated) * 1.5) * 1.5) * 1.5) * 1.5) * 1.5) * 1.5) * .98

11988006.328125 * .98 = 140838049808701.7442626953125, or over 130 million times higher hashing power than the next estimated difficulty? Wow, did I do that right?

So the over under difficulty would be 140,838,049,808,701 dropping the decimals, assuming that the estimated difficulty is the actual difficulty.

Feel free to check my math, please.

EDIT: I definately did something wrong here. Yup, decimal screwup. 11748246.2015625 is 98% of 11988006.328125. So the over under would be 11,748,246. About ten times the next estimated difficulty. That sounds more like it.

Well, a) Including the next difficulty, which I think will be higher than 1.05m btw, I only plan to stay in 6 more difficulties, not seven. So we'd have

1.05m * (1.5^5) = 7,992,004 +/- 2% (which is prettty precise).

So the point is 7,992,004-2% if I assumed I was going to be accurate within 2%, an accuracy that would earn me some kind of psychic award : )

b) Since we're waiting the next 6 days for the next retarget, we only need 5 * 9.3 + the 5 days so ~45 becomes ~50 given your generous +10% days. So it would be 50 days after the next retarget.

c) Give me a slightly larger variance, say 10%, and I'll stick with your premise of 1.05m and 50% increases over the next 50 days. I realize that if the retargets are under 50% that the days will be completely off (14 for example instead of 9.3 with a zero increase in difficulty). Sound good? And since I don't have an awful lot of btc, how about a whopping 0.5BTC !

d) Final #'s : 1.05m * 1.5^5 = 7,992,004 variance of 10% (which is 799200). Bottom range being: 7,192,803

50 days from the next retarget which is due in 6 days (June 25) is August 14th.

Bet: 0.5 BTC Cheesy

Quote from: Mageant on June 19, 2011, 01:43:53 AM

I think there is a very simple lower limit you can calculate mining regardless of price of future BTC in dollars.

With a certain set of hardware figure out how many bitcoins you will be able to mine with that hardware. Since the returns diminish they will approximate a certain number of bitcoins.

Then calculate how many bitcoins you could purchase for the price of that hardware at the current price.

If you can buy more bitcoins with the money then do that instead of buying hardware. That will certainly be more profitable because this calculation does not even include the price of electricity.

Without knowing what BTC's are worth, though, that is hard to predict in that fashion. For me, I wanted a GPU for gaming, so I am just a bored user waiting for the next big MMO adding my GPU to the network's hashrate. As word grows, people like me will likely be the bulk of the miners, since it costs us virtually nothing and we'd be buying the hardware anyway.