Quote from: erk on August 13, 2013, 08:25:27 PM

Quote from: kendog77 on August 13, 2013, 06:54:50 PM

Quote from: candoo on August 12, 2013, 07:26:35 PM

Do your homework. Difficulty goes from 37 to ~47..

Do your homework, candoo. You have a lot of learn, young one.

The latest difficulty adjusted to 50.8 m.

Quite so, and what people fail to grasp is, at that growth rate, anyone who places an ASIC order for above $20 per GH/s will no longer get a positive ROI. That means all unshipped BFL orders are now worthless. Same with Avalon and it's derivatives. Those units will no longer cover their monthly power costs in many areas.

This also means that the price of BTC/USD has to rise or miners will have to switch off their gear.

Miners need to be lower than 1watt per GH/s to still be viable. BFL, Avalon, and ASICminer are not.

Would you care to share the maths behind that statement?

The back of my napkin tells me that @ 40MH/W FPGA's are good to ~200M difficulty, ASIC Miner chips @ ~133MH/W are good until 666M difficulty - all assuming a $0.22/kWh power cost.

IMHO the difficulty can't keep rising at the current rate because it is a hell of a lot easier and therefore cheaper to go from 30TH/s to 60TH/s than from 400TH/s to 800TH/s. The next doubling to 1.6PH/s will be even more costly, unless the people building the next generation of ASICs are basically giving them away, and as the process technology shrinks down to the bleeding edge 20nm processes, the cost per wafer will actually increase...