When are "mining inflated" prices going to drop?

[3DVagabond]

Prices will drop soon, they already are to some degree. Mining is becoming less and less profitable by the day, and once cryptocurrencies crash back to sane values (which for anything other than bitcoin is basically zero) there will be a massive glut of miners begging you to pay $300 for R290s.



I can't wait.

This is what you said.

People have been waiting for years. It hasn't happened yet, nor has the market really changed in such a way that it looks like it's going to.

This was my response.

Actually, bitcoin has crashed dozens if not hundreds of times

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#tgSzm1g10zm2g25zv



I never said bitcoin wasn't here to stay, I said it will crash. I don't think that's a bad prediction based on its history.


Altcoins will be worth almost nothing. Until they offer something beyond being "not bitcoin" they're not going to be successful.

I never said you said bitcoin wasn't here to stay. Prices crashing in the past have not made mining unprofitable in the long run, which is what you are basing your predictions on.

My point is that people have been making the same prediction on GPU mining becoming unprofitable and there being a glut of cheap AMD cards flooding the market literally for years now and it hasn't happened. The crypto-currency market has not only maintained over this time, but is actually currently flourishing. It's to the point now that we have this AMD GPU shortage and nVidia is putting resources into making their cards competitive in mining. It is what it is.

As much as we gamers would like to see it go away and the GPU market return to normalcy (AMD needing to offer better value than nVidia and driving the ASP down) there is currently nothing changing in the market that is pointing to that happening any time soon. The best thing that can happen for us is nVidia becoming competitive and removing AMD's monopoly on the mining market. Competition is the best way to reduce prices.

 

[TreVader]

This is what you said.





This was my response.



I never said you said bitcoin wasn't here to stay. Prices crashing in the past have not made mining unprofitable in the long run, which is what you are basing your predictions on.

My point is that people have been making the same prediction on GPU mining becoming unprofitable and there being a glut of cheap AMD cards flooding the market literally for years now and it hasn't happened. The crypto-currency market has not only maintained over this time, but is actually currently flourishing. It's to the point now that we have this AMD GPU shortage and nVidia is putting resources into making their cards competitive in mining. It is what it is.

As much as we gamers would like to see it go away and the GPU market return to normalcy (AMD needing to offer better value than nVidia and driving the ASP down) there is currently nothing changing in the market that is pointing to that happening any time soon. The best thing that can happen for us is nVidia becoming competitive and removing AMD's monopoly on the mining market. Competition is the best way to reduce prices.

Mining being profitable "in the long run" doesn't change anything. If mining becomes unprofitable in the short run, demand will disappear and TONS of weekend miners are going to be selling their cards.

And I wasn't referring to your post when I talking about bitcoin being "here to stay". The other guy who responded to my post was talking about that.

 

[greenhawk]

An ASIC that would be good enough to yield the same
throughput as a herd of stream processors seems to me dubious,
it will cost more than GPUs given the latters huge transistors budgets
and the fact that they are used in massively parralel computations.

not likly. Given it happened to Bitcoins.

https://products.butterflylabs.com/

$1000 US for a device doing 50GH/s, a R9 290X ($500) looks to be about 1GH/s. (was using a local, non US price for the GPU)

https://litecoin.info/Mining_hardware_comparison

To add insult the video card is nearly 300W at full speed? the asic are low double digits (first light version was USB powered IIRC). And being USB, no need to have a large case/motherboard/power supply when looking to add more processing power.

Personally, when you see supporting industries making more money than the industry itself, it is definitly not smart to enter. If anything, it is time to start looking to exit. For example, looking at the products the butterflylabs above is offering, it includes processing time on a number crunching server. They are expecting a better return selling that processing time than actually using it themselves. (though I felt the point had been reached once their original offerings a year back started being shipped).

If ever there was going to be a high earning, short lived business, butterflylabs has my vote.




edit: just really noticed how cheap the rented GH/s offering is from butterflylabs vs cost of a GPU's performance. LOL.

 

[stahlhart]

This is not a cryptocoin mining forum. Discuss this subject in the existing thread:

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2365133

-- stahlhart