Bitcoin Forum

The next difficulty increase after the one coming Monday, I'm predicting/speculating that it's going to be MASSIVE.
Four things make me say this.
1. Recent coverage of Bitcoin on popular news sources.
2. The influx of brand new miners, as is evidenced by the forum. (Look at all the newbies that are popping up now asking for help getting their brand new mining rigs up.)
3. Major pools are seeing huge increases in their processing power.
4. The runaway pump on the open exchanges that's been happening over the past few days.

Anyone think we'll top 1,000,000 difficulty on 131040?
I'll start an open bet.
I think we'll top 1,000,000 difficulty on 131040.
I'll put 0.50 BTC on it.

I make a 0.50 counterbet. We will not top 1,000,000 on 131040.

Although the difficulty increase will be significant, the Bitcoin inertia is too large to have such a jump. 

At current rate I think max 700 000 but more realisticly around 600-625k

Although given the price increase inertia you're probably going to be gambling the equivalent of half a million dollars.

I don't think you understand that this thread isn't about the next retarget in 433 more blocks. It is about the retarget after that one.

I don't think there's any question we're going to be hitting 1,000,000 in the re-target after this one.  The exchange rate has doubled; thus so will the difficulty.

The most recent difficulty increase was ~78%.

If the next difficulty ends up being ~550,000, then it would take a ~81% increase the next round. I agree that that probably isn't doable.

If the next difficulty ends up being ~600,000 (which might be possible with the recent respike in hashing power), then it would take a ~67% increase. I think that is definitely possible, but might not be entirely likely.

Either way, it certainly isn't impossible to hit 1,000,000 on 131040.

Guys, just because the bitcoin price goes up DOES NOT mean difficulty will. You need a massive influx of new miners to do that. The difficulty rise before this one took like 3-4 days to rise, and this one has taken more than a week to get a difficulty rise that will be less than 30%. Unless hashing power comes up, then the next difficulty rise will be moderate, but you'd have to double the entire network's hashing power right now to get a 100% increase for the difficulty after this one. Its possible, yes, but you'd not only need existing miners to increase hashing power, but a lot of brand new people. Its just not realistic to assume that we'll gain 4-5 Thash/s in the next week.

Could be wrong tho :)

I'll pay out if I lose.

OK, then it's settled. At block 131040, I, Raulo, will pay 0.50 BTC to Genrobo if difficulty is above 1,000,000.

Edge case. Who wins at 1,000,000 even?

If it's 1mil even, I'll pay 1 BTC to Raulo and you too Xenon, because I doubt it will fall even.

 ;D

I also think the bubble will burst before that...

There are not enough ATI cards out there available for mining to bring it to 1,000,000 this round.  And that is good.   Mining is currently constrained by the supply of ATI cards.  Browser mining, FPGA's or ATI increasing manufacturing of older products could change this, but right now I am betting about 600,000 at the most.

my official guess, 736914   :D

if the value continues to rise along with difficulty, it will nearly even out.  and if that's true, I don't think anybody should worry too much about difficulty. 

What probably should be a concern though is when the blocks become 25btc instead of 50.  If difficulty continues to rise even when the block size is cut from 50 to 25, it will be alot less profitable.

This may seem obvious but how is the difficulty calculated exactly? By which I mean what is the algorithm not the basic concept. I know the idea is to be able to mint 50 bitcoins every 10 minutes but I'm not that familiar with hashing concepts. I've been curious about hashing rates vs. difficulty increases for a bit but I haven't seen the way it is calculated.

If not the precise algorithm (as it may be calculated in a complex manner) a way to roughly estimate would be helpful.

Yes actually I'm quite curious as well, does it take into consideration of the time taken for the round or does it not. Cuz if it doesn't then it'll be possible that a huge enough miner/pool to drop his/it's mining right before the difficulty adjustment to keep it in check.

I guess ~600k next round and ~800k the following one.

It's calculated as new_difficulty=old_difficulty*(time it should take to create (14*24*60*60/(10*60)) blocks) / (time it really took to create (14*24*60*60/(10*60)) blocks), unless new_difficulty > old_difficulty*4 or < old_difficulty/4.

See function GetNextWorkRequired in main.cpp.

Ah, so it's not directly related to hashing power but rather time to completion. Useful info-mation thank you.

So difficulty and hashing power share a proportional relationship, to double the current difficulty you will need to average double the previous rounds average hashrate. That makes me feel better about mining, unless we see some massive influx of people or some new mining tech comes about shouldn't be seeing 1mil for quite a while yet.

i will still use this number, i think its a good guess

As much as I like the FPGA/ASIC idea in theory, you are right, this is all GPU, and that won't change until either the BTC price stabilizes for 12mo, or the capital expense for these techs drops to less an order of magnitude above ATI cards, which does not seem likely. Nobody in their right mind would invest tens of thousands of dollars to build low ROI hardware to play in a market this volatile, especially given that it might become illegal in some large markets in 6mo. With GPUs and ROI around 1000%, not so big a risk.

Does anybody have numbers on the number of ATI HD GPUs actually produced? What would be the hashrate and relative difficulty if every one of them was put into service? I would wager that that number is a hard limit at least until a new line of next generation GPUs comes out.

5xxx cards have been out of production for ages. Sapphire recently released some 5850's and 5830's under the 'Xtreme' brand but those sold out within weeks due to low pricing.

6000-series cards are still out in the open as they "just" came out, but costs are pretty prohibitive compared to mhash/s. 6950 and 6990 are the only viable cards tbh.

5830's are still plentiful and cheap.  very cheap. 4 5830's can get 1.2Gh for $440.

Difficulty increase didn't seem to make as large of an impact as I thought?
Anyway, if you guys are worried about it and need a bit more power, Sapphire HD 5830's are on sale for $109 with free shipping on newegg, or the XFX 5830 is on Tigerdirect for $99 after rebate. Pick em up while you can, as xonar said, they're not in production anymore.

When do they reveal the next Difficulty?
Then i will build up my rig or send everything back :P

predicted: about 834000 in about 50 hours already.

Do they increase the dificulty every 2 weeks?

it could decrease as well.

But every 2 weeks?

Every 2016 Blocks.

And the system plans to solve 6 a day?

6/hour. I'd suggest to read some FAQs, wiki and basic info articles. It will help to understand bitcoins basic principles.

Exchanged rate says; "JUMP!"  Difficulty asks; "How high?"

you guys realise that blockexplorer (once it's back up) gives an accurate (based on current total processing power) estimate (http://blockexplorer.com/q/estimate) of the difficulty... why are you speculating about this?  It even tells you when (http://blockexplorer.com/q/eta) it's going to happen (Hint: on Wednesday evening, UTC)

Will

It seems I won. My address in the signature.

*sits in the background, gently tapping a baseball bat in my hands*

he better pay up boss