Prohashing Mining Pool Forums

Good afternoon!

• I haven't been writing much over the past few days because the main issues facing the pool remain the same. We need to increase manpower and get the Enterprise-class Internet connection installed.
• In regards to the first issue, we made another offer, to a third candidate, which will expire on February 12. If that offer isn't accepted, we're going to reevaluate whether we should increase the salary even more. The biggest problem we've seen is fraudulent résumes - with one scammer claiming to have worked on Ethereum dapps in 2012, three years before ETH was released.
• A huge benefit of the current decline in prices is that we will be able to move up SHA-256 mining. A bitcoin block is now only worth $100,000. Even if the bottom of this crash is $4000, which is a very high number in my opinion, that will still get the price of a block down to $60,000, which will be within our reserve requirements to get started. If the price falls to $980, which is where I think the capitulation will occur, then a bitcoin block will probably be down to $13,000, which is how much a litecoin block was worth during the top of the cycle.
• As to the connection, Chris received an E-Mail saying that the contractor is going to call him to schedule the fiber installation. We'll see if this is a call to schedule another call, or whether they will actually show up. Given the unreliability of the current connection in the middle of the night, we think that this installation will make a big difference in the system.
• We're sad to announce that AppleMiner decided to depart, after having been with us for a year moderating the forums. We wish him the best of luck and thank him for his service!

I'm not sure this is a good thing:

If bitcoin hit $980 -- you are going to have a real issue with miners unplugging unless Diff falls off an amazing cliff. The price of miners and power does not support that BTC price at $980. For the USA, the average cost per kwhr to run an S9 is $3.95 per day on revenue of $9.75 (BTC @7,000). For the European Union, its about $8.00 for the same revenue.

At current diff, a price of $980 would drop daily revenue to $1.37 USD but the fixed cost of power remains $3.95 remains. So, diff would have to drop >50-80%? just to break even. Or am I missing something?

So my point is .... unless you think people will mine at a loss ... at the price (980) the number of miners in the pool will only be a fraction of the current amount.

3Moose wrote:I'm not sure this is a good thing:

If bitcoin hit $980 -- you are going to have a real issue with miners unplugging unless Diff falls off an amazing cliff. The price of miners and power does not support that BTC price at $980. For the USA, the average cost per kwhr to run an S9 is $3.95 per day on revenue of $9.75 (BTC @7,000). For the European Union, its about $8.00 for the same revenue.

At current diff, a price of $980 would drop daily revenue to $1.37 USD but the fixed cost of power remains $3.95 remains. So, diff would have to drop >50-80%? just to break even. Or am I missing something?

So my point is .... unless you think people will mine at a loss ... at the price (980) the number of miners in the pool will only be a fraction of the current amount.

I'm certainly not hoping for price to hit $980. I just think that it will, because there's nothing to suggest that this bubble is any different than any other. The previous bubbles have all ended with the final capitulation around the previous high, which would be $1163. Since $980 has been a historic spot of resistance, it seems like a logical floor.

In regards to profitability, if SHA-256 miners are losing money, then some of them will turn off their mining equipment and the difficulty will decline. That's exactly what happened three years ago - that January, I remember when a big cloud mining service declared that all of its contracts would stop paying any returns, because it was too expensive to keep the machines running, so they just shut the entire service's miners off.

As a side note, there is probably an opportunity for people to become ridiculously rich whenever that final capitulation happens. It's ridiculous to me that anyone thinks that coins are going to disappear, and this whole panic is unbelievably overblown. At some point, it will be time to start making huge buys.