Quote from: Entropy-uc on March 01, 2014, 11:35:40 PM

Quote from: jimmothy on March 01, 2014, 11:28:08 PM

Quote from: Entropy-uc on March 01, 2014, 11:20:58 PM

Quote from: jimmothy on March 01, 2014, 11:16:58 PM

Quote from: Entropy-uc on March 01, 2014, 11:09:46 PM

Quote from: jimmothy on March 01, 2014, 11:05:24 PM

Quote from: Entropy-uc on March 01, 2014, 06:24:19 PM

It used to be easy to calculate the days to break even on a miner and make a decision to buy or not.

False. We only thought our calculations were more accurate. Now we know that calculations are just about guaranteed to be way off.

Maybe you were stupid.

I always understood exactly what I was calculating. When power bills were less than 1%, it was easy to ignore operating expenses, now you cannot do so.

As for difficulty, My 6 month projections have been +/- 10% for the last 2 years.

You are telling me you were able to accurately calculate the difficulty growth rate even with a huge amount of unknown variables like value of btc, hardware sold, hardware being used, new asic manufacturers, private farms, etc..

Can I borrow your magic crystal ball? Or did it stop working all of the sudden?

Seriously though, why can you not make reasonable estimations now if you could a few months ago when much less was known about the effect of asics?

Seriously, I can. Learn to read. It is not as easy as looking at mining earnings only any longer. You must also consider operating expenses now, and the inevitable day when expenses exceed your bitcoin earnings.

Con recently posted that he sold off his Avalon because electricity costs more than it earned. That day is coming for everyone soon.

Learn to read? What am I doing now?

Yes I understand that now (like gpus a year ago) inefficient asics will need to be shut off because they cost more in electricity than they earn.

This doesn't take away from the fact that the difficulty of bitcoin was never easy to calculate. You had no idea how many avalons/bitfurys/bitmain/bfl/asicminer were going to sell so your calculations were based entirely off guesses and that has not changed.

I guess it was hard for you. That's probably why you were buying Asicminer when I was selling.

A little understanding of economics, a couple decades in the semiconductor business, and plenty of market intelligence collected both here and from other sources made it pretty easy for me.

In fact there are several people on here who have made similarly accurate projections. I gained a lot of credibility with my business partners when DeathandTaxes published a projection last April that matched my estimates within a couple %.

I will say that it is difficult to estimate at what difficulty growth will level out to a more normal growth level of double digit % per year. But that has more to do with the amount of dumb money being thrown at the market, and pre-order cycles than anything else.

Double digit only per year??

Riight now btc difficulty is 3.8 B I would be surprised if it isnt more than 100 Billion by end of year. Thats 2600% in only 10 months. Who knows, maybe it might only be 50 Billion (still 1300%), but it could just as easily go to 200 Billion also.