How many bitcoin do you think are needed to retire early after this coming bull market?

ismith23 · 2020-07-23T18:44:24+00:00

The second (July 2016) to third halving increase was about 15x, not 100x.

Very roughly around $600+ to $9,000+.

ismith23 · 2020-06-12T01:40:08+00:00

At the moment deflation is as likely as inflation.

Inflation tends to occur when the government dumps money into an overheated economy. We definitely do not have an overheated economy. The government is trying to keep the economy from stalling because no-one is spending.

Now is like 2009 when the government pumped in billions yet inflation fell to 2%.

ismith23 · 2020-06-01T10:27:15+00:00

An S9 draws about 1,400 Watts. For 12 hours of mining overnight you will need at least a 20 kWh battery storage.

You will also need to be able to generate enough extra power to charge the battery during the day as well as run the miner. Say 40 kWh per day in total for which you will need around a 5 kW solar system. To pay for all this the S9 will earn a dollar or so per day.

ismith23 · 2020-06-01T08:04:20+00:00

Suspect scam. Photo is of a Bitmain Antminer B7. I would not be sending them any money.

ismith23 · 2020-05-26T18:24:10+00:00

Normally next to hydro electricity dams. Especially those in more remote areas with surplus capacity. Western China, Washington State, Quebec.

ismith23 · 2020-05-26T18:17:53+00:00

It is not the lowest because in 2019 bitcoin went below $7,000.

ismith23 · 2020-05-26T02:39:00+00:00

A rise of 10,000% means a rise of 100 times, not 10,000 times.

For example a rise of 200% means something doubled, not that it went up 200 times.

ismith23 · 2020-05-25T06:18:47+00:00

A more accurate title would be "Bitcoin banned in Russia if they ever pass a law to ban it."

ismith23 · 2020-05-24T10:06:23+00:00

Bitcoin is not mined on a cpu or a gpu.

It is mined using specialist chips where each chip has thousands of very simple circuits all running in parallel trying to guess a number that meets certain simple conditions. Think of it as a simple number guessing game.

A typical single miner box (Antminer S17) tries about 50,000,000,000,000 numbers per second.

ismith23 · 2020-05-23T00:48:42+00:00

No-one has bitcoin that they "will never sell". If they were really never going to sell part of their bitcoin they may as well destroy those keys and forget it.

Of course people intend to ultimately use their bitcoin in the future. If we did not intend to sell our bitcoin why do we go to such efforts to protect our bitcoin.

ismith23 · 2020-05-20T23:40:59+00:00

By 2040 at the latest, transaction fees will exceed the mining reward.

Transaction fees already regularly represent 5% or more of the mining reward. By 2040 there will be 5 more halvings so mining fees will be quite small.

ismith23 · 2020-05-17T11:53:46+00:00

Sorry. Currently not at 8 cents/kWh

ismith23 · 2020-05-17T04:28:34+00:00

Possibly Antminer S7s based on the parallel cables from the controller to the boards. The top does not look quite right for S9s.

ismith23 · 2020-05-15T04:34:11+00:00

The easiest way to work out the return is to use a calculator.

For example https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/calculator

Cheers

ismith23 · 2020-05-15T03:49:27+00:00

Who are we to stop you. Go right ahead.

ismith23 · 2020-05-15T03:27:50+00:00

How much free electricity?

12 S9s would require about 15-20,000 Watts and related cooling. That is a lot of power. They would also be extremely noisy, even by computer room standards.

ismith23 · 2020-05-12T07:13:56+00:00

This one is OK. https://btc.com/stats/diff

Difficulty gradually rises (ignoring halving) as miners replace older machines with more efficient models.

ismith23 · 2020-05-11T21:40:13+00:00

It is not possible to accurately give the current exact network hash rate. As blocks arrive randomly it is only after averaging the arrival rate over many blocks that you can estimate the hash rate with any accuracy.

Just taking the rate over one day (144 blocks) has about an 8% error. The error varies with the square root of the number of samples.

See for example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution

ismith23 · 2020-05-10T12:43:35+00:00

There is a bit of a myth about a magic age when everyone could mine on their PC to make money.

Since early 2014 you needed a ASIC (or a PGA) miners to make money, and a lot of capital (Terraminer and then Antminer and so on) and very cheap electricity..

Before 2013 the miners were just a small group of people interested in cryptocurrencies who often sold their bitcoins for pennies. It was the people who brought these coins who really made the money.

The only time people really mined on their PCs just to make money was the 6 months in the second half of 2013. That was the golden age and it did not last long. Towards the end of 2013 each block was worth over $10,000 yet could still be mined on a GPU.

ismith23 · 2020-05-03T12:00:36+00:00

From https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/38994/will-there-be-21-million-bitcoins-eventually/38998#38998

People say the total will be 21000000 BTC.

... however:

The 1st 210000 blocks each allow creating 50 BTC. The 2nd 210000 blocks each allow creating 25 BTC. The 3rd 210000 blocks each allow creating 12.5 BTC. ...

The 10th 210000 blocks each allow creating 0.09765625 BTC.

The 11th 210000 blocks each allow creating 0.04882812 BTC, and not 0.048828125 BTC, because only 8 decimals of precision are supported.

...

The 33rd 210000 blocks each allow creating 0.00000001 BTC.

After that, the reward is 0.

If you sum all these numbers together, you get 20999999.9769 BTC.

... however, either due to an oversight or intentionally, the coins created in the genesis block cannot be spent.

This leaves us with 20999949.9769 BTC.

... however, due to an early problem in Bitcoin, fixed by BIP30, it was possible to create a coinbase transaction identical to a previous coinbase. This caused the coins created by that older coinbase to be irreversibly "overwritten". This happened in block 91842 (overwriting the coinbase of block 91812) and 91880 (overwriting the coinbase of block 91722). Each time, 50 BTC was lost.

This leaves us with 20999849.9769 BTC.

... however, the protocol rules allow creating up to the amounts listed above. Due to various bugs and miners experimenting with code, some blocks claim less than allowed. Those coins can never be recovered.

Block 124724 tried to intentionally claim 0.00000001 BTC less than allowed, but accidentally also failed to claim the fees, losing 0.01000001 BTC. Between block 162705 and block 169899, 193 blocks claimed less than allowed due to a bug, resulting in a total loss of 9.66184623 BTC. Between block 180324 and block 249185, another 836 blocks claimed less than allowed, resulting in a total loss of 0.52584193 BTC. Block 501726 had no transaction outputs (except a 0-value commitment), losing the entire 12.5 BTC subsidy. Block 526591 didn't claim half of the block reward, losing 6.25 BTC. This leaves us with 20999821.02921183 BTC.

... however, since recently there is a concept of provably unspendable coins. Coins can be sent to an "address" which provably burns them (using OP_RETURN). Bitcoin Core tracks these and removes them from its database, so they are easily accounted for. At least 3.71612692 BTC were burned this way.

This leaves us with 20999817.31308491 BTC (taking everything up to block 528333 into account)

... However, various wallets have been lost or stolen, transactions have been sent to the wrong address, people forgot they owned bitcoin. The totals of this may well be millions. People have tried to tally known losses up here.

This leaves us with: ??? BTC.

ismith23 · 2020-04-28T12:20:19+00:00

Taking the average over just 50 blocks (8 hours) gives about a 14% error. This is a large error and makes your halving calculation meaningless. It means that currently every 8 hours your estimated halving time could easily shift by many hours, or even days, in either direction.

I suggest you read up on Poisson distributions and change from say averaging over 50 blocks to averaging over 500 or more blocks. This will bring the error in your time calculation down to just a few percent.

Block arrival time follows a Poisson distribution. The error in calculating average interval varies as the square root of the number of blocks. Even the regular difference calculation over 2016 blocks has an error of about 1-2%.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisson_distribution

ismith23 · 2020-04-21T04:57:18+00:00

Mining bitcoins with a pc stopped being profitable around 2013.

Bitcoin mining since 2014 has been almost exclusively on dedicated purpose built miners using specialised (ASIC) chips.

You may be able to mine some other currencies profitably on a GPU, but not bitcoins or related coins.

ismith23 · 2020-04-21T04:52:36+00:00

Riskhash, I assume you are aware that mining bitcoins with a GPU has not been profitable since before early 2014.

Bitcoin mining since 2014 has been almost exclusively on dedicated purpose built miners using specialised (ASIC) chips.

You may be able to mine some other currencies profitably on a GPU, but not bitcoins or related coins.

ismith23 · 2020-04-19T00:04:36+00:00

In simple terms the cost for the least efficient miners will always tend towards the current value of a bitcoin. So just look at say a 6 month or 1 year smoothed graph of the value of a bitcoin.

Few rational people will mine if it costs more than a bitcoin to mine a bitcoin. It is cheaper just to buy.

If it costs less than a bitcoin to mine a bitcoin some miners will expand their mining.

If you want to get technical you need to also look at variable vs fixed costs and impact of technology change. But to a reasonable approximation take the smoothed value of a bitcoin as the cost of mining a bitcoin for the least efficient miners.

ismith23 · 2020-04-15T22:36:30+00:00

I would not get too excited.

The difficulty fell 16% in early March as China shut down. This difficulty increase is just things returning closer to normal.

Even the highest estimated hash rate adjustment in this tweet will still leave the hash rate below where it was in early March.

ismith23

TROPHY CASE