Chris Sokolowski wrote:fugju wrote:vinylwasp wrote:
Profits will improve once the owners of earlier generation miners finally loose hope of a diff decline and/or a price surge and retire their uneconomic equipment and consign them to scrap. At this point in time we might loose a few hundred Ghs from the scrypt hashrate if we're lucky and diff will drop a little across all coins.
I dont think so.
If the people think, the diff will go down or be stable, like you, than there buying more and more A4 ... Get it?
I agree with you fugju; the other hardware really doesn't matter beyond the short term. If I was managing Innosilicon, I would continue producing A4s as long as people continue to buy them. Then, when people stopped buying them because they would never make back the initial costs, I would lower the price. People would continue to buy new A4s and difficulties would continue to increase until you couldn't cut the price any more.
No you're both right, eventually Inno will drop prices and new A4's will fill the gap left by 1st and 2nd gen hardware, but there'll be a period where uneconomic miners are retired and no new miners are bought because the ROI is so low before the price drop. During that period potential buyers will elect to mine ETH, X11, etc, or not mine at all.
This happened when A2's and other 2nd gen ASICs came into the market and what we saw was a big drop, followed by a small rise and then a very long period of stability as the rate of new 2nd Gen sales fell to almost nothing even though the price dropped significantly. See early 2015 here:
http://www.coindesk.com/data/litecoin-m ... ulty-time/. Comparatively we've just had a Dec 2014 event.
The decision to buy hardware is highly influenced by the price of electricity and like BTC mining I think we're heading into a phase where the economics of home mining scrypt is getting marginal for many.
Fugyu, the A4's are fixed, it requires a firmware upgrade to the B1 and B2 miner's ARM Micro Controller and moving to the 2.0.2 software on the Raspberry Pi. Once that's done, they run perfectly. I'm running mine at 1224Mhz at 805Mv.
BTW: There's already a 400Mhs version of the A4, you just run 3 miner units off 1 raspberry pi, instead of 2 (there's 6 connectors on the Pi), but I doubt you'll see it sold because (officially) it would require an 1800w PSU with 12 x 6pin PCIE connectors.
See this post for a more detailed analysis:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic ... sg17228911