Bitcoin Forum

So, I've been watching the oscillation of Litecoin difficulty over the last couple difficulty changes and this last one was interesting.

I could say that it looks like people are switching between alts depending on difficulty, but this last one had the network hash rate almost DOUBLING just before difficulty adjustment. That's some serious horsepower to all the sudden show up to the party.

Anyone have some thoughts on this? I would say that it seems either someone with considerable horsepower is invested in keeping LTC difficulty high (thus much less profitable than BTC mining) or people are just switching between the two depending on difficulty. I would say it might be a proxy pool, but most all proxy pools are SHA based, so they couldn't proxy out the SCRYPT proof-of-work to their clients.

Likely a large number of people with GPUs chain-hopping depending on whichever is most profitable. These difficulty oscillations will only get worse if we see an ASIC manufacturer ship. More GPU miners will jump ship from bitcoin as it gets less profitable - some will quit all together but some will probably mine other coins for a while.

https://i.imgur.com/EaJ3k.png

Of course, there is not a way to measure the true amount of actual hashing occurring, so charted are just estimates based on how quickly blocks are being solved.  And thus variance can be high, which is likely what explains that spike before the next adjustment.

The last three difficulty adjustments (when difficulty went up) had the same huge spike of hash rate right at the end of the low difficulty period. It is not variance.

The intention is to keep the oscillation going, whatever the reason may be...