Bitcoin Forum

Difficulty speculations by March 1 2014

Things to take into Account:
-New much stronger ASIC miners will be hitting the network by December
-All the New people excited about Bitcoin will be throwing whatever miners they can get their hands on at the network. Even though it makes no sense.


When would you say we will hit 1,000,000,000 DIFF?

Too low, I believe at least 2,000,000,000 DIFF...

Right now I have estimate 2.5 billion. It might be as low as 2.0 billion, but could easily be as high as 4 or 5 billion especially if hashfast and cointerra ship.

It depends on how fast these companies like BFL ship out the 500ghz monarchs etc. But, yes it will be in the billions.

Despite the poor reputation.

2-3 billion.

My guess would be 1.5

Misread the title "January"

So I would say 2,8-3,8

2.5 -3 bil

5 Bil.... cointerra is coming out with 1-2 TH/s......

Pretty soon, all of these ASIC companies are going to go out of business, because nobody in their right mind will pay for overpriced ASICs that will never ROI.

Nothing really wrong with not ROIing, as long as you support the network. But it's not worth paying through the nose for.

We will be at around 3.8 billion and that might even end up being conservative, by the end of next year easily over 11 billion.
"Just remember kids it's down the road and not across the street."

5 Billion...

I believe it would hit 1Bil end of this year.

1.5-2 billion by march, and that's only if a lot of outstanding promises by ASIC companies are kept.

Just out of pure curiosity and pure laziness to make the calculation myself , even with a 30% increase will it really hit 20bil?

Even if we have a 30% diff jump every ~two weeks until march, that only puts us at 5 billion difficulty by my calculations.  I still doubt we'll see that continuously for the next ~3 months.

shouldn't be hard to see a 30% diff jump... hashfast is shipping their product next month about 1 PH/s right?

My mistake, my calculation was based on a 2 week block time and 30% *hash rate* increase per 2 week period, not 30% diff increase.  I still don't believe we'll maintain the growth rate that started in august.  I stand by my prediction of 1.5-2 billion by march.  We would have to see a number of mining hardware manufactuers over deliver to get much past that.

Based on delivery estimates vs actual delivery for many of these companies, I think the rollout of the next generation of chips will be slower than many are hoping for.  After this jump to 28nm chips, we'll continue to see the growth rate slow as that's almost caught up to mainstream chip technology.

As I've said in other posts, ASIC chips have effectively gone through 7 years of chip processing advancements in less than a year.  That partially explains the massive increases in hash rate.  There was an ASIC gold rush, but its just about over so we won't be seeing these 30-40% jumps as a regular occurrence for much longer.

Eventually the growth slams up against equipment demand (dropping as projected ROI drops) and limits of current chip technology for efficiency in hashes/s per watt and $(BTC)/hashes/s.   

But if you're calculating month over month increases the way I was... not quite since diff is a function of hashrate over the last 2016 blocks, I was taking a 4PH hashrate, increasing it at 30% every two weeks and seeing what the resulting difficulty would be 3 months out, and that gives us around 5 billion.

10 billion diff in march means a roughly 20x increase in network hashing power by then.  I simply don't think there's enough next-gen hardware in the pipeline to support that kind of growth by then, nor will the vast majority of delivery targets be met.

3.2B

The difficulty has slowed down..

Bitcoin Difficulty:   510,929,738
Estimated Next Difficulty:   607,551,779 (+18.91%)
Adjust time:   After 27 Blocks, About 3.5 hours

So for march 2014 should be around 1 billion difficulty

the formul that I am using in my spreadsheet is:

current diff * 2^32 / 600 = hashrate

for now the formul was all time correct

so i can say only the hashrate is not growing parallel to difficulty but rather potentionaly.

i predict that the difficulty will be around 1.500 million around march or less.

The difficulty now...
Bitcoin Difficulty:    609,482,679
Estimated Next Difficulty:    729,797,192 (+19.74%)
Adjust time:    After 1556 Blocks, About 9.9 days
Hashrate(?):    4,791,435 GH/s
So its gonna be over 1Billion difficulty

2-3 Bil is my estimate, based upon estimated ship dates of various manufacturers.

Bitcoin Difficulty:   609,482,679
Estimated Next Difficulty:   730,105,490 (+19.79%)
Adjust time:   After 1094 Blocks, About 6.8 days
Hashrate(?):   4,913,705 GH/s

Hash continue to increase about 20%.. feel like its going to jump on the next difficulty..

Bitcoin Difficulty:                   707,408,283
Estimated Next Difficulty:   850,677,747 (+20.25%)
Adjust time:                   After 1458 Blocks, About 8.8 days

Looks like a whole bunch of Hardware just hit the network!

Things are only going to get worse with Cointerra planning to ship 1-2 PH/s in December :'(

between 2.6 and 5.8 billion

likely around 3 billion

Wow, note that a 20.25% increase is in 8 days.  We're only half way there which means the difficulty increase may be even higher.

Also, a 20% increase translates to a 45% monthly increase.  That's a lot more than 30%.

By March 1st (91 days) (3 more months)
Based on a monthly increase of (biweekly increase):
30(15)%  - 1.5 billion
40(18.3)% - 2 billion
50(22.5)% - 2.4 billion
60(26.5)% - 2.9 billion
70(30)% - 4.4 billion

Though it could be more than 30% increase per block.  Though I'm not sure.  This is only quantitative analysis.  I'm not really that intune with the ASIC development and release schedule.  So what are your predictions?

The numbers I produced just show the feasibility of different results.

4.2

Based on the numbers I can find, the current total hash rate of the network is around 6000Ths. KnC is building 1200 Neptunes to be released in first or second quarter 2014 each with 3 Ths for a total of 3600 Ths to be added to the network. If my calcs are correct that means almost a doubling of the hash rate from one manufacturer and one batch.

Do everyone's estimates of 5 or so billion difficulty by March 1 take that into account?

Morris

There will be new hardware in the market between December and March, but after the 28nm and 20nm become standard, the old hardware will become obsolete, of the 7PH currently hashing, probably about 5PH will stop hashing soon because the electricity costs to keep them running will be too high.

On top of that, after difficulty has risen to a certain level, it will into rise exponentially anymore, at least not anywhere near the speed it did before, because the new hardware will not be as much of a leap in technology as GPU mining was compared to CPU and FPGA to GPU and ASIC to FPGA.

The new ASICs will not be several orders of magnitude better, therefore the difficulty after May or so will not increase with more than ~20% per month or so probably.

Please look at numbers before making such assumptions.
And if we cut 70% of the hashing rate wouldn't that make it profitable again for people that haven't sold their machines to mine again ?

It doesn't work that way.
Electricity cost are so low compared to the reward it's worth even now keeping your usb miner on. It's not worth buying one , but keeping one mining is.

I really think will all these shipments in Feb and March and all the new people entering the mining scene it will be around 4-5 billion.

once the difficulty reaches 5~7 billion, most hardware that is online right now will be unprofitable. They'll cost more in energy than they will gain in bitcoin. This will slow down the rise in difficulty.

I may not lower the difficulty, but it will likely slow down the increase.

Exponential growth will at some point slow down, always. And with mining, we are likely close to the point where it slows down.

like i already explained there's two factors that will slow it down somewhere during next year:

1) We already have very advanced ASICs and the market becomes more and more saturated with them, every self-respecting miner has at least 1 ASIC by march, and new technology will not bring mayor leaps, they will bring improvement obviously, but nowhere near the leaps of GPU, FPGA and first generation ASICs. And new miners won't join the market if it's not profitable.

2) Old miners will go offline because of high energy consumption compared to next generation ASICs.

If all the companies ship on the dates they claim, ~5 billion difficulty. You have to remember that come march there will be atleast 10,000TH hashing power added to the network

I hope none of them will deliver :)

mean difficulty increment over last 6 increments....                  21.5890372%
mean difficulty increment over 6 increments previous to that...  28.2274193%
mean difficulty increment over last 12 increments...                  24.8641200%

for what it's worth.

Difficulty History   from: -- http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Date   Difficulty   Change   Hash Rate
Feb 28 2014   3,815,723,799   21.92%   27,314,015 GH/s
Feb 17 2014   3,129,573,175   19.39%   22,402,357 GH/s
Feb 05 2014   2,621,404,453   19.49%   18,764,744 GH/s
Jan 24 2014   2,193,847,870   22.59%   15,704,175 GH/s
Jan 13 2014   1,789,546,951   26.16%   12,810,076 GH/s
Jan 02 2014   1,418,481,395   20.12%   10,153,885 GH/s
Dec 21 2013   1,180,923,195   30.01%   8,453,378 GH/s
Dec 10 2013   908,350,862   28.41%   6,502,229 GH/s
Nov 29 2013   707,408,283   16.07%   5,063,826 GH/s
Nov 17 2013   609,482,680   19.29%   4,362,847 GH/s
Nov 05 2013   510,929,738   30.70%   3,657,378 GH/s
Oct 26 2013   390,928,788   46.02%   2,798,377 GH/s
Oct 16 2013   267,731,249   41.45%   1,916,495 GH/s
Oct 06 2013   189,281,249   27.19%   1,354,928 GH/s
Sep 25 2013   148,819,200   32.13%   1,065,289 GH/s
Sep 14 2013   112,628,549   29.56%   806,227 GH/s
Sep 04 2013   86,933,018   32.22%   622,291 GH/s
Aug 24 2013   65,750,060   29.40%   470,657 GH/s
Aug 13 2013   50,810,339   35.88%   363,715 GH/s
Aug 03 2013   37,392,766   19.63%   267,668 GH/s
Jul 22 2013   31,256,961   19.47%   223,746 GH/s
Jul 11 2013   26,162,876   22.63%   187,281 GH/s
Jun 29 2013   21,335,329   10.32%   152,724 GH/s
Jun 16 2013   19,339,258   23.92%   138,436 GH/s
Jun 05 2013   15,605,633   28.41%   111,709 GH/s
May 25 2013   12,153,412   8.64%   86,998 GH/s
May 12 2013   11,187,257   11.03%   80,082 GH/s
Apr 30 2013   10,076,293   12.28%   72,129 GH/s
Apr 17 2013   8,974,296   16.96%   64,241 GH/s
Apr 05 2013   7,673,000   14.59%   54,925 GH/s
Mar 24 2013   6,695,826   38.13%   47,931 GH/s
Mar 14 2013   4,847,647   10.98%   34,701 GH/s
Mar 01 2013   4,367,876   19.63%   31,266 GH/s
Feb 18 2013   3,651,012   11.47%   26,135 GH/s
Feb 05 2013   3,275,465   10.33%   23,447 GH/s
Jan 23 2013   2,968,775   -8.64%   21,251 GH/s
Jan 08 2013   3,249,550   9.06%   23,261 GH/s
Dec 26 2012   2,979,637   -11.59%   21,329 GH/s
Dec 10 2012   3,370,182   -2.00%   24,125 GH/s
Nov 26 2012   3,438,909   2.08%   24,617 GH/s
Nov 12 2012   3,368,767   1.95%   24,115 GH/s
Oct 30 2012   3,304,356   7.55%   23,654 GH/s
Oct 16 2012   3,072,322   0.58%   21,993 GH/s
Oct 03 2012   3,054,628   6.65%   21,866 GH/s
Sep 19 2012   2,864,141   6.31%   20,502 GH/s
Sep 06 2012   2,694,048   10.38%   19,285 GH/s
Aug 25 2012   2,440,643   11.40%   17,471 GH/s
Aug 12 2012   2,190,866   7.57%   15,683 GH/s
Jul 30 2012   2,036,671   9.12%   14,579 GH/s

and of course hardware mfgs dole it out like diamond merchants..

It's too complicated question. No one has an exact answer

Oh really , this is probably the funniest statement of the year:)