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Showing 20 of 405 results by taipo
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Board Mining speculation
Re: Are we all going to power consumption hell?
by
taipo
on 31/01/2016, 19:37:54 UTC
Once the hash rate stabilises, probably somewhere between 200B - 400B taking moores law into account, then the math needs to be done on estimated mW consumption world-wide, and impact on the planets eco-system that SHA256 mining will have, and if the results of the study are *bad*, then it begs the question because this idea then becomes yet another form of opulence for which we all must eventually pay the ultimate price.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: my new diff thread covers Oct 23 to nov 5? +0.033% to +1.16% ?
by
taipo
on 02/11/2014, 20:04:39 UTC
When the difficulty hits 50B at current tech & current avg watts, big players will start thinking about calling a world-wide truce. Hashrate will top out somewhere after 400PH and well before 700PH unless someone invents a quantum miner.....
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Re: how can mining still be profitable even for the big farms
by
taipo
on 16/10/2014, 19:46:50 UTC
Noone sinks that many millions into huge facilities like that without a long term plan so people should not assume the big farms are turning a profit 'at the moment'.

My guess is its a waiting game, as Ive said in the past, first to blink.

5 or more large players owning a huge chunk of the hashrate, holding the difficulty up to break point and waiting firstly for the small players to drop out then medium players rigs to become unprofitable enough to drop out eventually only leaving those players too big to quit.

If they can hold the hashrate to dollar value high enough that noone in their right mind would every want to contest them, then they have won the arms race.

The end game then is a bitcoin version of OPEC (  perhaps Organization of the Bitcoin Exporting Companies - possibly a reincarnation of the Bitcoin Foundation ) which will be an economic cartel with the task to coordinate the policies of the bitcoin mining conglomerates. The goal would be to secure a steady income to the large mining conglomerates and to steady the price of bitcoin while guaranteeing constant supply to the markets.

Basically a complete bastardisation of everything Satoshi tried to create.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: Negative Difficulty (Difficulty DEcrease)
by
taipo
on 09/10/2014, 06:40:52 UTC
The lesson that few home miners will take away from this little human experiment in greed, is that if bitcoin was to have succeeded then the movement should have spent the greater part of its time growing the use and implementation of bitcoin around the globe. Instead the bitcoin movement has obsessed with an arms race for lions share of the hashrate and lost out to the hardware providers whom the movement created, resourced via this misguided use of peoples time and energy to create this abomination that is now the industrial mining complexes that circle the globe.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: Hash rate declining slightly in recent weeks.
by
taipo
on 08/10/2014, 05:35:55 UTC
back from helping to nurse my sick brother-in-law back to health.

Real world stuff sucks much nicer typing away on site.

and  on :

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty


Bitcoin Difficulty:   34,661,425,924
Estimated Next Difficulty:   35,474,047,220 (+2.34%)
Adjust time:   After 246 Blocks, About 1.6 days
Hashrate(?):   271,806,654 GH/s



and on http://bitcoincharts.com/

Difficulty   34661425924
Estimated   35000997201 in 246 blks

about 0.97%


Yup, heh wake me up when the difficulty gets to 50,000,000,000 or a network hashrate of about 400 PH which ever comes first...
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Board Mining speculation
Re: Call to arms!
by
taipo
on 06/10/2014, 07:24:46 UTC
Perhaps people have to start seeing this from the market share perspective. Large operations are grabbing market share and it is in their interest and the interest of their investors not to concede that to anyone else. Big invested operations can run at a loss for a short period of time, how many large corporations do you know of that did not turn a profit on the odd year.

One only needs to look at the history of webserving, how it began as home operations then corporatised, and finally its erosion into 4 or 5 major cloud storage monoliths ( MS, HP, Google, Amazon et al ).

In a sense the large uneconomical farms should have already been shut down but instead their life is being extended by a reinvestment by the general public. It is a business model that has worked for them so far to varying levels of success, and will continue to work while the gen public keep falling for it.

Problem is so much time and effort in the cryptocurrency world has gone into the mining arms race, rather had that time and energy been spent extending the use of cryptocurrencies into communities around the world, the value of it would be steadily rising, instead it is in nose dive because the demand for it is not as high as the need to sell it to pay power bills.

When this is all over, and the last home miner is switched off, I hope the lessons people take away from this is that laissez faire capitalism, no matter how well it is coded into protocols, has and will always fail via the greed of men.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: Call to arms!
by
taipo
on 05/10/2014, 21:44:54 UTC
How the difficulty is still going up, I don't understand.. If I had to pay for electricity, I wouldn't be mining right now. But I have free electricity. Cheesy

Because it's not home miners! Home miners are completely insignificant now and have been for the past several months. The hashrate is going up because ASIC manufacturers build for themselves and stock their miners in massive datacenters. And they aren't paying residential electric rates.

Yup, and the closer the cost of mining gets to BTC earned, the higher the desperation of the large farms to convert BTC as fast as poss to pay mining costs, thus putting enormous pressure on the BTC exchange rate driving the value downward, which pushes the cost of mining closer to break even, and repeat the process above - more pressure to turn over BTC, driving value downward etc etc.

There is a certain level of fiduciary irresponsibility at play here with some big operations, with others, its clear to me they are a tax write off who have little concern with the cost of mining.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: Call to arms!
by
taipo
on 05/10/2014, 21:37:56 UTC
How the difficulty is still going up, I don't understand.. If I had to pay for electricity, I wouldn't be mining right now. But I have free electricity. Cheesy

I will posit two examples for people to consider.

Using a single Antminer S2 in the example with BTC value of $300

Example 1:
At 13 cents a kW, the electricity cost of running an S2 per day is about $3.43 and at $300 per BTC you would be mining around about $4.42, the supply cost then represents about 77.6% of the potential mining cost.

It doesn't matter how many S2 miners you have, this % mining cost only varies if you pay for tech staff to manage a large facility and any repair costs. Small businesses, i.e. home miners, CANNOT compete with large businesses who can run close to break even.

Example 2:
A fictitious web hosting company turned mining operation as a tax write off. It doesn't matter what the miner/mining costs are, if a company has $$$ to write off, they can do so by adding a tonne of miners to their racks and just blast away. Noone would question the purchase of miners as to the tax department or auditors, they are just more 'servers'.

While running their facility at a loss, they also earn BTC by the truck loads in undeclared wallets. It would be illegal to do so in some countries, but I have a feeling this is part of what is going on here along with legit big farms running close to the line.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: I want to start mining. What's the best Hardware I should purchase?
by
taipo
on 05/10/2014, 03:09:38 UTC
I have stable electricity and I have enough to spend on the bills. How do I go about this? What hardware should I buy? And how do I start mining with it?

1/ Do the math. Work out the kW usage and costs of the various miners available, sticking with recommended manufacturers that gives you the best hash rate to power ratio
2/ Factor in the need for cooling. At the very least heat extraction from the server room.
3/ Factor in the various configurations of miners. Some come as complete units, others need a controller and/or proxy, and/or need a separate power supply.
4/ Factor in noise. The higher the hashing speed the more noisy the miners tend to be. Spondooley for example may make your lounge area unlivable. Noise will determine location on some machines, that and heat issues. Noise can also come from cooling if you are using extractors. Look at noise dampening tech for extractor fans, insulated ducting etc.
4/ Most of the more reputable manufacturers only accept bitcoin as payment, so if you intend to purchase a miner from them your first stop once deciding what you want to buy, is in most cases to buy some bitcoin. That means signing up an account with whatever service is selling/trading bitcoin, or if theres an ATM in your area or other means of acquiring bitcoin.
5/ Factor in import costs depending on which country you live in, or whether or not you are importing from overseas or purchasing within your country. Many countries have tax and import fees added at the border.
6/ Most reliable miners have How To's in the Hardware forum. Once you have your miners, search the hardware forum for the correlating miner and follow the setup instructions
7/ Sign up at a pool and point the mining addresses of your miners at the pool or pools
8/ Get a bitcoin wallet and withdraw any mined bitcoin to your wallet.
9/ Keep track of the difficulty @ http://nextdifficulty.com The difficulty typically rises about 5 to 15% every two weeks.
10/ Mine until the cost of mining meets the value of bitcoins mined ( probably within a month or two )
11/ Then join the rest of us in this forum who have become cynical and grumpy, and come moan about how fucked bitcoin mining is Wink

Good luck and see you back here in a couple of months.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: STOP BUYING MINING HARDWARE
by
taipo
on 03/10/2014, 23:05:53 UTC
But what happens IF btc spikes to 1200us?

If its just a spike then it means nothing, but if BTC rises to $1200 via growth of the BTC economy, which means a general rise in price, then the big mining companies/manufacturers turned miners who have cheap power and financial resources will triple the size of their operations.

The answer is the same if BTC goes to $30,000, large manufacturers turned miners will multiply their facilities by 100 x to match, and the difficulty will follow as it always has done so.

There are big players now running this game, its over for those that do not have the same power rates as the big players do.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: Negative Difficulty (Difficulty DEcrease)
by
taipo
on 03/10/2014, 22:45:37 UTC
Most had predicted the rise of hashrate in jumps would peak about now. I think it still has a way to go yet. Maybe by XMAS before the big players start to blink.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: Is it the end of mining or a new beginning for Bitcoin?
by
taipo
on 03/10/2014, 22:43:13 UTC
Mining just isn't worth the trouble anymore.  Unless we see a huge surge in price or the prices of miners slashed, its just not profitable to the majority.

I have a feeling we will see sub 300 prices within the next 2-3 weeks.

The big players can mine close to the line between cost of mining and value of mined BTC. Any huge surge in price will be followed shortly afterward by a huge surge in hashrate and the onflow of rise in difficulty.
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Board Hardware
Re: ANTMINER S4 Discussion and Support Thread
by
taipo
on 30/09/2014, 20:27:47 UTC
Looks like I have an S4 coupon to part with for a micro donation. PM me if you are interested. First in first served.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: I think the Bitcoin difficulty will go down around October 10, 2014
by
taipo
on 30/09/2014, 19:16:15 UTC
We just happen to be in a lull but it's likely to change soon.

I agree, I think it could well be a case of being between large scale mining farm startups. Or, a large section of a mass farm could come online tomorrow and blam, up goes the difficulty. Predicting the future at this stage is still a fickle effort.
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Board Speculation
Re: The future
by
taipo
on 27/09/2014, 22:46:14 UTC
Bitcoin will go back to ten bucks soon

Really?  How soon?  I'd sure like to know, prognosicator.

The price issues is more directly associated with the low trade volume of BTC

There just isn't a big enough world wide demand/use of BTC to sustain a daily value higher than $400 to $600 USD
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Board Mining speculation
Re: OMG difficulty to hit 40,000,000,000 at current rate of increase
by
taipo
on 27/09/2014, 02:41:40 UTC
https://cryptanalys.is/difficulty/bitcoin_btc.php now shows 34,709,951,920 with just 7 hours on since I made that post. So its predictions this early in the piece are as you say, quite off the mark.

Might have quite an interesting result this round I feel.

I started to parse predictions from all the sites I know about at http://nextdifficulty.com so you don't have to waste time switching between sites Cheesy I will also track predictions in time so it'll be possible to see which are useful and which are not. If you know about other sites predicting difficulty let me know I'll add them too Wink

Well done.

Chances are rising for a very low increase this round, barring a datacenter coming online in the next week of course......
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Board Hardware
Re: ANTMINER S4 Discussion and Support Thread
by
taipo
on 27/09/2014, 00:15:12 UTC
Funny how Bitmain went from the preferred home mining manufacturer to the most hated so quickly. What a fickle business this BTC mining is!

Miners got themselves worked up about the possibility that Bitmain would deliver them a 2 TH miner for a song. Remember the S2? 1 TH for about 3 BTC. While it didn't sell like their other miners, people still bought them.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: OMG difficulty to hit 40,000,000,000 at current rate of increase
by
taipo
on 26/09/2014, 05:04:20 UTC
https://cryptanalys.is/difficulty/bitcoin_btc.php now shows 34,709,951,920 with just 7 hours on since I made that post. So its predictions this early in the piece are as you say, quite off the mark.

Might have quite an interesting result this round I feel.
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Board Mining speculation
Re: OMG difficulty to hit 40,000,000,000 at current rate of increase
by
taipo
on 25/09/2014, 22:35:21 UTC
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Topic
Board Hardware
Re: ANTMINER S4 2TH/s, Batch 1 on Sale this week, shipping before Sept. Ends
by
taipo
on 24/09/2014, 20:19:13 UTC
S3 miner was 0.58. 6 of those (2.8 Th/s) comes in at the same price for way more hashes.

Would it not cost more in electricity to run 5 x S3's than an S4?

Some questions that will help
1/ What would be the total cost of 4 or 5 stock S3's INCLUDING PSUs
2/ Can the S4 be overclocked
3/ What is the power efficiency at the wall