Bitcoin Forum

The trend certainly looks like we're in store for the first difficulty decrease since January, 2013.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

One difficulty adjustment does not a trend make, so don't get crazy and invest in a lot of new mining hardware if the difficulty does go down in the near future.  :)

Time between blocks is now over 11 minutes here.
https://blockchain.info/stats

Remember that large Chinese operation with 2013 generation ASIC mining. They probably cannot cash flow at $400 and are shutting down (or getting shut down by the power company). Alternatively, they may just be turning off the old miners and waiting for BTC to recover.  We may be seeing the 2013 generation ASICs dropping of the grid.

You may be right.

I certainly hope so, but once the S4's start shipping that's just going to jump right back up.  Despite the fact that the S4 will not ROI they did sell out of batch one.

Well the claim is they sold out.  They did not sell that many.  the pay address is floating around I think they sold under 500 of them.

We're way to early in this difficulty period to surmise that difficulty will go down. But I'll go out on a limb and say it's not going down.

And it's not going up because Bitmain (and other consumer miner vendors) will be shipping. It's going up because the large-scale mining operations are still hugely profitable and not shutting down yet. They're adding more miners in stages. We just happen to be in a lull but it's likely to change soon.

I suspect the profitabilty threshhold for the fab farms is closer to 200USD. They are still banking big and won't even blink building out huge new capacity for at least a couple more months.

I give it a 50/50 to go down/up. But if there is an increase it will very likely be a small single digit increase...

Similar to what happened on June 29th. Diff went up almost 25% and on the first few days it looked like it will drop. And on July 12th it went up 3%...

It's very likely that some old hardware was disconnected. But new hardware will probably compensate for that in the next week or so...

I think it's better for them to just stop insta-dumping the new minted coins and wait for the price to recover.
Instead of shutting down their miners that is.

I guess they have some cash left to pay for the power for lets say the next month...  :P

I agree, I think it could well be a case of being between large scale mining farm startups. Or, a large section of a mass farm could come online tomorrow and blam, up goes the difficulty. Predicting the future at this stage is still a fickle effort.

By the way: we have an active market on predictions on the difficulty.
https://www.fairlay.com/event/category/bitcoin/difficulty/

We have a prediction running if every difficulty change is at least a increase of 3% this year.
https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/every-difficulty-increase-in-2014-by-3/
If you click on: [show additional stats] you can see that currently chances are between 53.98% and 50% that it will happen.

If there is interest we can add one wether there will be a decrease this year.

The latest predictions can be found here: https://www.fairlay.com/predict/latest/

Looks as if we had an upward spike in the hashrate today.

Yes as the bitmaintech s-4's are starting to arrive in data centers and the like. 

My guess is 3-5% diff jump.
 
time will tell

I do not think the difficulty will go down. Based on trends and new miners coming out a lot of the manufacturer's have new machines go on and offline to play with the difficulty. It would not be hard for bitmain to do this. It explains why one day the difficulty is going up 13% then 20% then back to 15%. IT takes some serious hashpower to move the difficulty up a few percent which only manufacturer's or companies have.

Its nice to see it go down after watching it spike pretty hard there.

Let me clarify that a little bit for you.  The bitcoin protocol has no knowledge whatsoever of actual hash rate.  All it knows are the timestamps of found blocks and the current difficulty.  Spikes in hash rate as shown on graphs like those on bitcoinwisdom.com are made up of not only hardware being added and removed from the network, but also statistical variances.  Remember, the entire process of finding a block is nothing more than luck.  You try a random nonce, apply a hash and see if it works.  If it does, congrats.  If not, you try again.  A miner with 1GH/s could potentially solve 5 blocks in 5 seconds, which would produce a perceived spike in the overall network hash rate.

In short, your last sentence should read, "It takes some serious changes in perceived hash rate to move the difficulty up a few percent..."

It's interesting to see the difficulty slow down and the hashrate level off a bit. I think a lot of the smaller farms are pulling the plug, I know that last week was the first week that I mined at loss in more than 3 years, so others must have taken a hit in the past month. I shut down my asic SHA256 farm in July and contemplating shutting down my scrypt farm this month. If difficulty did drop and the price of BTC started to go up again, I might get back into it, but for now, I think the mining era is nearly over. Too many large farms in China and elsewhere are throwing whatever they have at mining no matter what the cost with investors dollars.

I don't think the difficulty will go down, since that'll be the time Bitmain and Asicminer will shipping out their new miners.

I think it'll be either sometime next year or early 2016, before we see an actual difficulty decrease.

The prediction that difficulty is going down isn't looking very likely now.  ;)

Or maybe of decrease it will stay the same for really long time. After latest events I don't believe that it will possible to decrease difficulty of mining btc. Unfortunately, because it would be really nice move.

I heard people are getting their first batch of S4s delivered today.

I've also heard it's a small retail batch and they've  probably already been "burning them in". So that's not likely to have much of an effect.

But what will cause the difficulty to rise is the thousands of machines that Bitmain will be adding to Hashnest over the next month or two. Retail equipment shipped to home miners has become virtually insignificant compared to the massive farms that add can add 10's of PHs in a matter of days.

I think bitmaintech has the ability to add and take back far more hashpower then people realize.
As I type we are at

 + 2.84%  jump on btcwisdom
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

 and about - 1% on bitcoincharts
http://www.bitcoincharts.com/

Is this a brand new generation of chips? Or repackage of the S3 chips? Thousands of miners in the pipeline imply some pretty aggressive business decisions that may prove unfortunate. Right now, at $1400 plus shipping, the S4 does not make sense verses buying BTC, so they are relying on unsophisticated purchasers or true believers who think the difficulty increases will drop below 10%.

I didn't say they were shipping thousands of S4s to customers. I suggested that they would build thousands for their own Hashnest datacenters.

And once installed, they won't give a shit if they actually sell the cloudhashing. If they don't sell, they'll just mine with them. And you can be sure that they don't charge themselves $1400 per miner. ;)

And this is why most of us can no longer mine at home.   

we are over paying for the gear. 


  buying the s-4 is  1400 usd after shipping     this is 70 cents a gh   

 more money per gh

asicminer sells the long tube for about  561 usd   you get 1400gh  that is 40 cents a gh  yeah you may not get it until oct 15th

but 40 cents a gh vs 70 cents a gh  is too big of a difference.

There always will be a company for the home miners...
i just dont understand is this the way that things are happening

first some company produces and deliver the miners building a name
then when the name is build they take preorders
then with the preorder money they mine with next generation or newer equipment
and theyforget customers cause they dont need them
after some time US marchals come into the company


Hope bitmain will not forget the customers that supported them
This product S4 had not been widely accepted as I see when S3/s1 was a success
Must be the odd numbers HI HI

Was hopping for a drop in difficulty too, but I don't think so..

yeah  a 2% jump is looking good.