Bitcoin Forum

And now for another Tin foil Hat production.

Looking at the network difficulty over the past few changes, Then looking at the network hash rate, It does look like someone minipulating the difficulty, Let me explain.

The last difficulty was set to go down, then in the last few days the network avrage went from 16TH to 22TH, untill difficulty went from 2.1m to 2.4m, since then network has been steady at 15TH with expected difficulty to go down to 2.2m then guess what, Now were sitting at 23TH, coincidence? who would gain from harder difficulty?

http://i1242.photobucket.com/albums/gg522/squall1066/64f88edb.png

My theory, BFL, Basicly, If they have 50TH to ship, (unlikely but this is the speculation thread) then for the remainder of that block they will all make big money, So by makeing sure it gets harder, People will want more BFL equipment to get more hashing power to keep up with this change, BFL make more money, everyone is happy.

Intrested in your thoughts, If you think everyone is just turning on GPU's and FPGA's, Hog wash, 7TH all at the same time! Twice! sorry not in my head. also, It is perfect timing for BFL to start testing eqipment.

well obviously these spikes are due to asic hardware, but what you are saying about manipulation makes zero sense.

no-one cares what the exact current difficulty is with regards to asic tech- its so far ahead of the current hardware its going to be bought en masse anyway..

yes this is my point, the fact that no-one cares means no-one will notice, I'm just thinking that this is to bump the difficulty up to buffer the asic release, I just think this will benifit no-one bar BFL, thats all.

http://static.blockchain.info/pools.png?format=png

Yay ASIC testing! Or at least that's what I'm assuming it is as well...nothing like a random 'Unknown' popping up and taking up 3+TH/s

Those rates are based simply on the timing of solved blocks.  When your pool solves two blocks in row in 5 minutes (8X the rate it normally would) does that mean suddenly 8X the hashing work was being performed, or does it possibly mean there was luck?

Now there still is a backlog on BFL Bitforce equipment, so those shipments are continuing.  There is suddenly a bunch of hashing from "at least 450" FPGAs brought online thanks to a working bitstream:
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=94317.0

There are other ASIC ventures, perhaps one is further down the road than BFL?

Or, BFL which says October, really is on track and is testing.

All that's known is that if the BTC/USD settles in here at $10ish and difficulty rises further (or even hangs at this level), come block 210,000 there's going to be a lot of graphics cards hitting eBay.  I was expecting more GPU to be getting decommissioned by now but the rise in the exchange rate made it so they were decently profitable once again.

"unknown" has been there for ever
it didn't just "pop up"
blockchain.info (source of that graph) take best guess on block source - anything they cannot identify goes into "unknown" this includes solo miners, private pools, botnets and blocks from pools they cant identify (often including some of deepbits blocks)
I quote http://blockchain.info/pools
"A large portion of Unknown blocks does not mean an attack on the network, it simply means we have been unable to determine the origin" its even in red on that page to stand out :D

Ah, wasn't quite aware of that...though I suppose reading would have helped :P

And if we did assume it was ASIC testing, then solo mining does make sense...or at least a private pool of sorts.

Well you learn something new everyday! These are valid opinions, But when you look at it through noob eyes, it really looks like someone has to gain from raising the difficulty.

"If someone can gain from a bad situation, They will make it bad" - cant remember who said, But was a world class entrepreneur, and helped to mould me into the conspiracy theorist I am today.

Maybe US gov is looking for some BTC... :))

You are more than correct with "learn something new everyday"! The quote below that just blew my mind with the feeling of "Wow-that's-so-obvious-and-true-why-didn't-I-realize-that". 2008 financial crisis anyone?

guess we'll see if the same thing happens before next difficulty change...september 12th is it?

Should be around the 7th September (1162 blocks to go atm).

and estiamted to go up to over 2.5 million
http://bitcoindifficulty.com/

http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=528