Honestly, I think home miners should only mine as a hedge against bitcoin price stagnation, which could theoretically lead to difficulty stagnation. If you are long on bitcoin, have a sort of 15% mining operation.
Lets say you buy 10 BTC. Maybe it would behoove you to buy 2 Antminer S3's. If the difficulty skyrockets beyond profitability too quickly, then it would be probably safe to assume that the bitcoin price would have reflected upward momentum to account for the increased difficulty.
Again this is in a perfect world and we all know miners aren't rational. But in the event of a +20% btc price, you would see a lot of old miners turn back on, and other companies roll out batches to gain hashpower. At this point I can see maybe the difficulty doubling at the current BTC price.... anything beyond that and I'd start to worry.
Lets say you buy 10 BTC. Maybe it would behoove you to buy 2 Antminer S3's. If the difficulty skyrockets beyond profitability too quickly, then it would be probably safe to assume that the bitcoin price would have reflected upward momentum to account for the increased difficulty.
Again this is in a perfect world and we all know miners aren't rational. But in the event of a +20% btc price, you would see a lot of old miners turn back on, and other companies roll out batches to gain hashpower. At this point I can see maybe the difficulty doubling at the current BTC price.... anything beyond that and I'd start to worry.
The home user obviously can't mine if difficulty goes up but the fiat price doesn't - they can't get BTC ROI currently and then they may not even get fiat ROI.
The mining manufacturers, on the other hand, who can sell the miners for 5x their cost - they can still make miners for themselves and mine until the difficulty is 5x higher. So we know who is adding the the network...all those private farms we subsidized
^^^^ This - we were literally just discussing that here... CoinTerra rolling out 11 MegaWatt farms after we purchase a huge amount of hardware from them left a pretty bad taste in our mouth. Just saying... thanks for selling it to us at retail (when we inspected the insides of the machines) which were pretty rigorously protected (even as far as seals) showed some of the patch work that went into the machines.
So essentially as she correctly wrote... we literally purchased 2nd hand hardware at full retail while they mine with better equipment before they sell it on to us... >:|
Killed our industrial sized mining operation - rather than roll over and die we chose to move to a more feasible location and try to recoup whatever investments we can.
The same Cointerra that promised 2TH/s in January and ended up delivering 1.6 unstable TH/s in March? The same Cointerra that said they didn't have enough money to refund customers was able to buy a 11 Megawatt farm? I'm shocked. How could this be!?!
That was sarcasm for anybody who couldn't tell. These mining companies (for the most part) are out to make money for themselves and if they have to sell you hardware at high prices and mine on your hardware for a month or 2 they will do that. What you gonna do, call the Kansas State AG?
(That was a reference to the reports that Sonny paid off the AG to stop BFL from being investigated since they're able to scam away for 2 years unhindered).Yeah... four of our 1.6s died and we were left with no recourse - the whole experience was very unsavory but we kept fighting.. not to mention the RIDICULOUS amount of power those bad boys pull... 600AMPS is nothing to these machines on a medium sized scale.
At the very least we were happy to be a part of the eco system and just hope to recoup our investment on other smart SHA256 coins (And of course hoping the BTC goes back up and moves to its rightful place... on the moon. (lol)
Wonder what the Devs will do when they realize between Megabigpower and Cointerra that they already more than likely have 35-50% of the hashing power of the entire network - Don't get me wrong - I love that bitcoin confirmations are SUPER fast and it protects the eco system with hash speeds that make any other network pale in comparison... I just don't think it was right to piggy back on smaller/medium sized players (Even the recreational home miners) to boost your own mining facilities which compete directly with the consumers you sold hard ware to..
Nope... 2 thumbs down