Bitcoin Forum

I've been looking over the charts and it seems like the network hash rate is starting to plateau.

Is this a short term or long term trend? Could we enjoy the current difficulty level for more than 12 days?

Is this an indication that most of the available hardware is in the hands of miners and we should expect another jump as the next generation of hardware is shipped over the next couple months?

Or is the observation period too short to determine if this is a plateau or not?

Lull before the storm.

There are two factors that will reduce the rate of difficulty increase in the next year or so:

1. Power costs approach mining revenue.
2. ASIC designs approach state-of-the-art.

That's what it seems like, it's starting to plateau. Some of the older miners with their USB sticks may be giving up, and especially those still trying with GPU's may be into the scrypt altcoins now, as the interest there has really taken off. The rush to get into it as a newbie may have peaked as well, seeing how the ROI factor isn't worth it to buy most currently available "affordable" newbie rigs for themselves. It's still going up though, and as you say there will probably be another few big jumps once the next gen new rigs come online, but how will they factor into the total hashrate over time. So it looks like there's a temporary respite now, but it's still going p by about 22.6% in about 20 hours according to Bitwisdom, not a welcome jump at all but much better than the 30%+ jump they had predicted earlier in the cycle.

Speaking of stabilization, the exchange rate (at Bitstamp) has been mostly between $800 and $850 for most of January. Has the exchange rate ever been this stable?

Yes around $100 much more stable.

I believe your evaluation of very accurate and it is nice to see a smaller rise in complexity for now.

Mtnminer

prices have been static for a month now (below$1000) so miners are not making as much profits with the last few weeks jumps , thus the cost to mine vs profit has made it not worth adding more miners. ..... or more simply put:


we should start to see a price rise where miners start hoarding coins, because its not in their benefit to mine at a loss. thus causing a rise in demand/price rise. ..... or more simply put:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg2920zczsg2012-03-27zeg2012-06-01ztgSzm1g10zm2g25

And then this happened:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg2920zczsg2012-05-01zeg2012-08-15ztgSzm1g10zm2g25

Here I was, on July 15, 2012, when I decided to invest in Bitcoin.  I was trying to understand exactly how it worked so I could secure my coins.  It took my about two weeks to figure out how to acquire and secure the coins, and I watched in pain as the price went from $6 to $10.  Stop rising!  I'm coming, just wait!

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/800x600q90/855/71k4.jpg (https://imageshack.com/i/nr71k4j)

I have similar memories, except it took me about 10 months to feel comfortable buying some coins, and I watched in pain as the price SOARED from a bit over $4 to almost $14!

I was sure that I had missed out on everything because of my own inability to commit and take the risk.

I've been doing some mining, but only have a block erupter cube, and it's only making me about $9.50 a day and this will go down by over 20% tomorrow. Paid $979 for it, and has been online for almost a month. Seeing the price of Bitcoin being down in the $600 range, I decided to invest in a small way, bought 1.05 BTC in 3 instalments in Dec-Jan, starting when it was still in the $600+ range, and paid a total of $785 cash (via Coinbase bank transfer), which is now worth $854. Not much of a gain yet, be we'll see.
I also have 3 rigs now mining altcoins, this alone should mine over $600 a month (just built the last one yesterday), and I invested only about $1700 in these, upgrading an old box with a Radeon 6950 (it won't take anything newer on the mobo), and building 2 new ones with R9 280X's. Hopefully the altcoins will keeping pumping at the same rate per hash, not like Bitcoin where the $'s erode every couple weeks.