Bitcoin Forum

Next Difficulty in 23 blocks    1,371,967   http://www.bitcoinwatch.com/

is this increase true ?

Will be slightly higher, pain days!

I like cheese...  ;D

while most people cannot predict the future, i'm going to amaze you with some feats of presdigitation:

difficulty will be a bit higher than 1.372m even. Tomorrow after the difficulty increase there will be a bunch of new threads about "OMG SOMEONE BROUGHT 5 THASH OF NEW POWER ON!"
After a few days this person will disappear and the network hashing rate will vastly decrease back towards the levels it is at now, then continue to slowly increase. People will cry and moan about the new difficulty and how much less they make but they'll just keep hashing it out anyway like they should.

The future has been written.

Wow I somehow managed to forget about those threads.

"WOW SOMEONE JUST CRANKED IT UP TO OVERDRIVE"
"UH OH LOOKS LIKE A BIG FPGA FARM JUST CAME ONLINE, WHAT DOES THIS MEAN FOR MINERS"
"NEXT DIFFICULTY ESTIMATE - 6 MILLION?!??"


I'm excited already!

Next Difficulty
in 2 blocks

ITS GONNA BE AWESOME !!!!

/yawn

Next Difficulty
in 1 blocks

WOW THIS BETTER THAN EBAY!!!

Here we go!

OMGWTFBBQ, who has fired up their FPGA Farm??!!

I'll continue:

OMG DIFFICULTY ESTIMATE OF 5516782.99327646 WHAT WILL WE DO OH GOD NO AAAHHHHH

So you've all noticed the slight impact of my little ASIC Experiment? Will fire up the remaining identical clusters #2, #3 and #4 within the hour... ;)

1379223.4296725

yeeehah! ;D
 

Higher is better.... Right??

 ;D

Now, that is a big increase!

Last block at BTC was 4,937,602 shares. Gonna be a rough weekend. *lol*

It doesnt matter how high it is.
The higher the difficulty, the higher the price.
The lower the difficulty, the lower the price.


Fjordbit:

"
If the rate of difficulty change goes above this amount (36.2%) and all other things stay equal, then it will stop making sense to purchase systems and instead it makes more sense to buy bitcoins. This will drive up the price of bitcoins, lowering the btc per MH/s cost for a mining rig. It is possible the difficulty could fall if people come offline, but this is doubtful as it will still make sense to run an existing system.

If the rate of difficulty change goes below this point and all other things stay equal, then it will stop making sense to buy bitcoins and instead it makes more sense to buy a system. With more people coming online, this will push up the difficulty level.

If the exchange rate of usd to btc goes up and all other things stay equal, then the btc cost of MH/s goes down, and it makes more sense to mine than buy. With more people coming online, this will push up the difficulty level.

If the exchange rate of usd to btc goes down and all other things stay equal, then the btc cost of MH/s goes down, and it makes more sense to buy than mine. This will slow the difficulty rate.

If the dollar cost of a mining rig goes down, it makes more sense to mine than buy. This could have the effect of lowering the btc exchange rate or increasing difficulty or both.

"

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=20219.0

That's a very simplistic view.

What "makes sense" in an ideal world, and what individual people decide is right for their situation, are two different things. It's not as if a miner can just flip a switch and decide to buy rather than mine, and then flip another switch and start mining again. He may have equipment that he still needs to pay off with mining, or decide to get rid of. If he sells the equipment to recoup his money, he's not likely to go through that whole process of buying/mining/selling again. People are likely to lock themselves into either mining or buying, and are not likely to switch back and forth between just one or the other.

I am not locking myself up.
I know plenty of people (including myself) who buy/sell and mine synchronously.

Yes, that was my point. Please re-read my post, I specifically said that people do not switch back and forth between doing JUST one or the other, despite the simplistic view that that is what "makes sense". People are likely to lock themselves into mining, due to equipment and shipping costs. For them it makes sense to keep mining, even when the ideal situation dictates that buying is preferred. While mining, they may choose to also buy, and if you do, it makes sense to buy when the difficulty/price ratio is right for buying, and sell when it is right for selling. The whole time, though, you'll still be mining.

Shocking but true.

1242.5 MH/s = 0.84 BTC/day

Sweeeeeeeetttttttttttttt!!!!!

Bring it up more@!!!!!!!!

Damn, I'm down to 0.3 bitcoins per day now. After the next difficulty increase, mining won't be worth it to me unless the price goes up to AT LEAST $25. But maybe I'll keep mining a while longer anyway, and just hold for a while.

This is not exactly true. Mining is the supply of bitcoins, but you are leaving aside the demand. If for some reason people stopped demanding bitcoins, difficulty could go up and price down for a while. Obviously this would discourabe miners and its expected that some stopped mining, thus bringing the difficulty down.

But its silly and dangerous to believe that because difficultry go up price will go up. If difficulty goes up, suppy will be reduced. The price will depend on how demand reacts.

i mine and trade as well

This ^^

Wrong supply is never reduced... it is always the same amount of coins per hour, doesn't matter if you have 1 miner@ 1 MH/s or 20,0000 miners@ 200 GH/s it will always produce the same amount of bits coins on per hour(on advarage over the difficulty period), the only thing that changes is the difficulty based on how fast these block are being done(aka how many GH/s for total network) which also mean how many people mining these. you are correct about demand.. this is what determines the value of bitcoin nothing else, because your cost of mining goes up it doesn't do nothing to the value of bitcoin if there is no demand for it... $38 per coin came from a the media frenzy(silk road) nothing more, don't assume it will go back upto those prices again any time soon... At the moment there is more supply than demand, the worst thing is is supply never goes down as the bitcoin will always be in circulation and it not a consumable.

It seems to be going up about a dollar every 3 days or so.  So who knows?

Wallets get lost.  Accidents happen.  Supply is decreased.  Maybe it will be less of a problem in the future.  Maybe.

I think VERY soon it becomes a matter of faith. This Mt. Gox situation is preventing the true (if you can call it that) price discovery. It's interesting that the difficulty rises while trading is limited amongst all the exhcanges. Oh what will happen? What indeed?

But it does change because difficulty changes every half month (+-4 days...), so if suddenly a lot of people is mining like is happening now there will be temporarely an increase of production and probably and increase of supply (assuming the same ratio of miners that sell). When the difficulty adjusts and miners stop investing in more hardware then the supply stabilizes (reduces from the frenzy).

There is a temporary increase of supply if a lot of people starts mining.

Hmm, i can't totally agree with that.
Price drives up difficulty, difficulty does not drive up price.
We have seen this when the prices were 30$+, bitcoin had a lot of media attention since then and we saw a huge increase in total network speed, thus driving up difficulty fast. If the prices stay low for a while, the total network speed will slowly increase, and the difficulty will increase slowly.

Edit: Something else:
Arent we supposed to see a huge increase in network speed and like over 90,000 topics about it since the difficulty change? Did bitcoincharts change something to fix this "bug"?