Bitcoin Forum

Hello everyone, I didn't look around the forum very much so please excuse me if this question has been asked alot before. In any case it is not clearly explained on the official bitcoin wiki.

My question is, besides 'regulating' the rate of blocks found, what is the role of difficulty? The emergence of ASICs will probably cause a great increase in difficulty this year. Does difficulty also reinforce the security of the network? I find this interesting because if so, I'd say the bitcoin value can be expected to go up with the prevalence of ASICs since they will lead to a more secure network and might attract more investors.

ASICs are going to move all the smaller rigs (most personal miners) to LTC or FTC.

Meanwhile, someone will try to develop an ASIC for LTC but find out that scrypt is a lot harder to make an ASIC for than SHA 256 is...

Yes, but what aspects of the bitcoin network does difficulty affect, besides the hashing power needed to find a block?

difficulty adjust becase this way new block is found every 10 minutes in average if the same hash speed is used as 2 weeks ago

bitcoin has a set target of 10minutes per block.  but that's just the average it aims for

http://allchains.info/ shows it well.  every 2016 blocks, the system adjusts the difficulty such that if the average network hash rate for the last 2016 blocks were to remain constant, blocks would be produced every 10 minutes. 

since ASICs will increase the hashrate, the difficulty will follow.  the last few retargets were over 20%, those are massive jumps, so the presence of ASICs are really evident now

I think the difficulty affects the security of the system as well, such that the more difficult it is to create a block, the more difficult it would be to break it. Not 100% sure about that though.