Quote from: DrYak on December 04, 2013, 05:11:54 PM

Quote from: vpasic on December 04, 2013, 10:08:31 AM

unless btc value go up for a couple of hundred dollars more.

Well given the current trend of BTC, this *is* going to happen.

Saddly, the other certainty is that, with the current production of ASIC ramping up, the difficulty will also be exploding.
Currently you have a time to share of 1.3 days (which is not bad, and once you hit this share, P2Pool starts to pay you constantly based [more or less] on your hashrate [I'm over-simplifying])

But in a few weeks, they'll be so many people hashing overall, that the difficulty is going to explode and your time to share is going to climb up to a week or more.
(Each time with payment spiking after a share is found, then gradually fading out).

P2Pool is even more complicated, as its shares are quite difficult and you spent long time with no share and no payment if your own hashrate is too small compared to the whole P2Pool network.

Currently, ASIC mining is hard. The only way to be successful, is to predict in advance which company will be good at bringing next crop of mining hardware the first, with the least delays and least performance problems, and then manage to order among the first and get it delivered soon enough, so you can reap a few bitcoins before the whole difficulty explodes as next generation floods the market. If you picked up the wrong horse (like Butterfly labs, in the current generation :-P ), by the time they ship and you receive, you'll have bought an expensive and noisy space heater.

On the other hand, I you don't mind that much, and aren't interested into making a fucking crazy amount of money, but are more interested into contributing to the network, keep hashing, even if you have a small hashing power, you and all the poeple with small hashing at home, help avoiding that all the hashing power gets concentrated in the hands of a few data-center owner, with cabinets full of 10'000$ ASICs)

Thx for the info. Yes I've calculated that I will be lucky to break even with this board but its a fun hobby for me and if bitcoin does rise in the future then it will end up being a good investment as I will mostly likely hold on to the pieces I help generate. I like the idea of the p2pool network since its the closest thing you can do now a days to mining on your own and it helps keeps the big pools from just getting bigger.

So just curious when would you stop hashin on p2pool? When the difficulty spikes to where it says share once a week or greater? I have looked on the active members page of http://p2pool.info/ and it shows some people hashing away with under 1GH supposedly (not many like 3 active shares from that group) from trying to hash earlier on P2pool I know their share generation at that speed would be 2 weeks or so. Do they possibly just have a good hasher and point it to the p2pool network until they find a share and it gives them a piece and then they point somewhere else? Just curious on how the p2pool payment system works haven't seen a great explanation yet.