Quote from: edwardBe on January 17, 2018, 06:41:55 PM

Kind of reminiscent of the gold mining days in California in the 19th century. The people who made the most money were the ones selling mining equipment, mules and horses and wagons, clothing, food, liquor, housing and sex.

Exactly! The old saying goes:
In a gold rush, sell picks and shovels.

And that's why I have just sold my S9 on Ebay, for $2600 more than I bought it :-) !!!
Imagine that, a used antminer selling for double the price of a new one, just because it's available now!
And that $2600 is profit on top of the $2000 it made me while I had it running...

This opportunity is not going to last though, according to the graphs above an S9 will not make $2600 ever again based on the current network hashrate growth.
But no matter how I try to explain this in the S9 thread, people keep coming up with dubious ways to defy the maths as an excuse to jump on the latest Bitmain S9 Batch, that will be delivered months from now.
Talk about a gold rush...

Quote from: edwardBe on January 17, 2018, 06:41:55 PM

On a different note, a newb question: I don't understand why more miners means more difficulty. Do they compete with each other somehow? I thought the difficulty would be just how hard it is to find a block and verify it.

The difficulty automatically adjusts based on the total network hash rate so that on average we keep mining about 1 block every 10 minutes, that's it's sole purpose.
Now the bigger the total hashrate gets, the smaller every miner's individual piece of the pie gets...