Quote from: Hydrogen on August 26, 2018, 10:17:51 AM

That could indicate that miners are buying additional mining hardware in anticipation of bitcoin's price rising.

I think over time, ASICS have evolved and improved enough in terms of nm process to where GPUs are no longer as competititve. And so we see nvidia's GPU demand for mining purposes declining significantly. While the overall hash power of bitcoin's miners increased by 155%.

That's the closest I can come to explaining it.

If you want numbers, nvidia's current GPU's are fabricated @ 12 nanometers.

While bitmain's ASICS are fabricated @ 16 nm.

I think the gap between GPUs and ASICs used to be much larger, which gave GPUs a better competitive edge.

It has nothing to do with the nm in the chips, it's all about reward and availability

It's simply because back in the winter/spring you couldn't just pick up an ASIC from Walmart, plug it in and start mining. You had to wait for the order...and there was a looooooong wait....

Bitcoin difficulty doesn't always reflect the price because there wasn't simply enough ASICs to cover the spike in mining profitability. The same was experienced by the GPUs when you simply could't buy a single damn videocard.

But at this point, things start to have a few slight differences.

If you're lucky with cheap energy, you might still get an ROI on an S9J in 6 months, as it brings me about 1.86$ a day at a price of 500$, with a 1080ti which I can buy for 800$ right now I get 72 cents....

If I own a powerful GPU I can still let mine during the night, when I'm away, as long as it's profitable I don't give a damn as I would have anyhow bought it either way, mining or no mining. When it comes to ASICs you simply dont't have this kind of freelancer miners Tongue

dragging up the difficulty and not caring about ROI.

And the third...
No ASIC manufacturer can't compete with Nvidia or AMD in capacity...nor it is sure it can sell those products
Nvidia can easily produce 1 million cards even if ETH goes down as it could simply sell them to gamers and delay the next series to get rid of them, if bitcoin drops to 1000 bitmain has nobody to sell 1 million miners so they simply can't mass produce them and keep them on stock.

This would become clear if both coins would go in a week to x5 in value.
The eth network will jump in value far faster than the bitcoin chain, and it will take months for the BTC hashrate to become x5 to reflect the price.

Quote from: BitHodler on August 26, 2018, 01:06:34 PM

Quote from: rickadone on August 26, 2018, 12:50:56 PM

Hence, I think the easiest assumption we can do is at least at the short term we may not see a great spike at the price of the altcoins we all know, not at least trhu miner pushing.

That's a pretty safe assumption. If Bitcoin isn't in the mood to pump, which it may not be for a very long period of time if the 2014/2015 bear market is our main indicator, then altcoins will continue to bleed hard.

People praise altcoins for how fast they can increase, but they discard the fact that they also tank just as quickly. Bitcoin down 10% mostly translates into a +20% altcoin decline, which is killing it for miners needing every penny.

The situation is indeed a bit bad for altcoins. I'm amazed that they are not following BTC during this little rally, and really interesting it that some are actually going down.
If the trend follows we're going to see a lot of chains struggling against a 51% attack