Bitcoin Forum

What happens next? When the difficulty is too high do you give up, try and compete or will there be something else on the horizon?

There will still be a need for miners, however, the majority of their pay provided by the miners fees, and not block rewards.

For GPU, just stop mining, for ASIC you can stop mining when electricity cost is more than reward and resell to those who have free/cheaper electricity, or use it in winer as electrical radiator

In fact I dont mine with my GPU now because the reward is simply not worth the troubles

Obvious, switch to other cryptocurrency.

When the difficulty is too high, that means it's too hard for botnet miners to make money and too hard for anyone to pull off a 51% attack. Naturally, the correct thing to do is celebrate! And we'll have balloons, and strippers, and naked Twister™. It's gonna be awesome! ;D

But seriously though, if the difficulty is too high for mining to be profitable, the less efficient miners will be forced to give up (unless they don't mind losing money), resulting in the difficulty decreasing to compensate. But that's less exciting.

Funnily enough I was wondering the same thing when I saw the Litecoin difficulty go up again this morning..

So far, raise in difficulty is constantly compensated with it's raise in value.
If this trend continue, there's no need to worry about it.

@hedon
The raise of difficulty with the raise of the value was only during last few month. I hope too that this trend will continue. However new ASICs should appear in the near future, and that will definetely raise the diff for BTC. Looks like than LTC will be a better option since ASICS can't mine LTC

Stryder, take a look at this graph for example http://www.cryptocoincharts.info/period-charts.php?period=1-year&resolution=day&pair=ltc-usd&market=btc-e
If you move mouse over graph you can see difficulty in that period.

It seems that difficulty is in direct relationship with value for a long time.

If LTC goes to steady value of +5 USD in next 30-60 days it'll confirm trend.
So we just have to wait and enjoy this exciting future :)

just getting into Bitcoin and wondering the same thing.

I've heard people talk about the difficulty corresponds with the price, but if the price drops the difficulty stays the same or continues to go higher right? I just bought heaps of GPUs :p and love it so not too worried, but the thought has crossed my mind re the cost of elec being greater then the coin amount mined.

No. Difficulty only depends on the total hashing power produced by miners. If there are more miners, or miners use more powerful equipment, the difficulty goes up. If there are fewer miners, or miners use less powerful equipment, the difficulty goes down. The only connection between difficulty and price is that when the price goes up, this makes mining more profitable, which encourages more people to mine, which drives the difficulty up. The reverse happens if the price goes down. This is only an indirect link, and short-term fluctuations in difficulty and price are almost certainly not related.

gotcha, thanks for that.

diff high = bitcoin on high price most likeley on 300$+

I am curious as to how much the reward will be from the fees.