Bitcoin Forum

Will this period be the first in modern times where the difficulty goes down?  We look to be possibly on a path to a difficulty decrease this time.  
https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty (https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty)

Good thing you adjusted the title - no such thing as negative difficulty, of course :)

As for 'first in modern times', that depends on what you define as 'modern times', but the last time it happened was apparently the 25th of January, 2013.  So, quite a while ago, and it would mark only the 20th time it's happened.

The next difficulty is still many blocks away, though (1,032 at moment of refresh), so I wouldn't peg it down just yet.

here you can watch the chances for different difficulty changes.

https://www.fairlay.com/event/category/bitcoin/difficulty/

It is still likely that the next increase will be around 3%. I don't think a decrease will happen.

We're still a week away from the next difficulty increase. Yes, I said INcrease. It's not going down. Let's just call it a hunch.  ;)

Isn't it funny that one month after my GB SP30 were delivered that the difficulty stopped? Looking back in the GB thread makes me smile at all those replies with nonstop +20% difficulty increase projections.

Congrats. All of your customers will now only suffer a 50% loss instead of 70%, surely something to be proud of.

Of course everyone who bought any ASIC before June has already turned a profit by now but as we know profit is irrelevant to SPtech hardware owners.

Modern times is since the introduction of asic chips. It'll be interestingif this is a real change or just a blip from bfls hashing ooperation going off line.

In that case: Yep, would be the first time since then (approximately May 2013 - mass introduction of the Block Erupter USB)

Are you talking about a $ or BTC loss?

Nah, the difficulty increases started slowing down in July, before those were delivered.

Let's take a look back at when it started:


Since the GB was opened, the difficulty increases have averaged 13.3%. 15% was a damn close estimate for more than a dozen difficulty increases.

Your comment was based on JWU42's estimate:

http://btcinvest.net/en/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php?diff=6978842650&dcosts=4995&diff_mincrease=15&blpbtc=25&dhsmhs=5400000&diff_mincreasedecrease=0.5&btcusd=453.80&dpowcon=2500&btcusd_mincrease=1&pcost=0.115&calcweeks=32&dleadtime=9&action=calc#

After 13 increases he estimated the difficulty would be 35.5 B. It is now 34.6 B. Great estimate JWU42!

You are right - 15% increase has been a very good estimate so far. But I think we are all pretty sure that it will not continue. Otherwise we would have a diffuculty of 100B at the end of the year.
http://btcinvest.net/en/bitcoin-mining-profit-calculator.php?diff=34661425924&dcosts=4995&diff_mincrease=15&blpbtc=25&dhsmhs=5400000&diff_mincreasedecrease=0.5&btcusd=453.80&dpowcon=2500&btcusd_mincrease=1&pcost=0.115&calcweeks=32&dleadtime=9&action=calc#

If you would predict that and you would be right you would get 5 times your money back:
https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/bitcoin-difficulty-100b-by-the-end-of-the-year/

Even the decrease on the next changes get more likely, currently you get 1.6 times your money back if you predict against it:
https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/difficulty-will-decrease-on-next-change/

Most had predicted the rise of hashrate in jumps would peak about now. I think it still has a way to go yet. Maybe by XMAS before the big players start to blink.

well with the price on a steady decline, it only makes sense difficulty decreases/stagnates.

No it doesn't. At least not in the short term. ASIC manufacturers have long term plans to continue to add hash capacity to their massive mining operations. We may have adjustment periods now where we don't see big jumps but they will be interrupted by frequent 10-20% difficulty adjustments.

Just wait until Bitfury brings a couple more DCs online in the near future.  ;)

so what now, mine other coins ?

All other POW coins are complete crap... or will soon become crap when the new generation of Scrypt ASICs start jacking-up the difficulty.

Mining is dead (or dying) for every coin.

Well a difficulty decrease isn't that bad considering Bitcoins is hitting 35 Billion right now
Some sort of stabilization might actually make mining more attractive again
Sometime in the future of course or it might slow down the arms race or perhaps central mining centers kind of tricky to tell the trend transition going on here.

It's really sad that ASICs can't do Folding@Home. We'd cure cancer in a week if we could switch our gear over to Folding instead of mining, lol.

No, because BFL just started his mining factory again...

2016 blocks average right now suggests a -3% adjustments, and only five days to go. I'd say that yes, by now there is a pretty big chance the difficulty will actually go down. For that not to happen the hashrate needs to see a sudden increase pretty soon and sustained for the rest of the difficulty period.

no kidding

Betting sites have it around a 50% either way. It's going to be close.

I think will will spike the last 2-3 days and go to +1 or +2 %

Why do you think it will spike?

s-4's in transit from bitmaintech to  miners will come back on the network.

 more then  1 or 2 percent of the network  is in transit to new s-4 owners.

 Not talking a big gain like 10 %


look at the sales here

https://blockchain.info/address/1QB8Ds5KbGYBLQa5RyDQ2sVUeSKWf7qgkZ

I count hundreds not delivered by the dates :

 I count 72 paid for on 9-30-2014
 I count 57 paid for on 10-1-2014
 I count 25 paid for on 10-2-2014
 I count 17 paid for on 10-3-2014
 I count  8 paid for on  10-4-2014  that comes to around 180 units  that is 360th  which is not 1 or 2 percent ,

 but I think most of the sept 29th orders are not on line  brings it to  290 units of  about 580th  .   

580 th is nothing these days. thats <0.5% increase.

but they have hashnest  and it is more then 4ph and growing.

  asicminer is selling the long tubes pretty cheap  .

which is why I can see a 1+2% jump.

Retail miners make up just a small portion of the hashrate these days. In my opinion, it's useless to use as a basis for predictions. Someone like Bitfury just has to flip the "on" switch for a new DC or two and the difficulty jumps another 20%.

not exactly but close enough.

I suspect that they could add 20th with ease. for 3 or 4 diff jumps alone.

The problem big data center/builders have is not adding gear. it is adding fiat price to the btc itself.

I have mined  10 dollar coins in early jan of 2013 I hit the runup to 240usd in april 2013  I hit the runup to 1100 in nov 2013.  

These companies need to runup btc price not btc diff to make money.

we need to see what happens  with diff

as the btc to usd is sinking close to the 300 dollar level

As of 2014-10-05 02:10:00: 702 more blocks need to be found before 2014-10-09 21:18:02 for it to increased in difficulty.

4 days 19 hours 8 minutes. That's 9.84 minutes a block. or 59.04 minutes per 6 blocks. Currently we are doing 59.8 mins p[er 6 blocks over the last 504. It's going to be VERY close. A few more % in real hasrate have to be added in the last day or so to make up for it. Otherwise it's going down.

I'm currently seeing 0% as of this moment and there are still 4 more days to go. And the block find rate is now 7.06 per hour.

It's going up.

Don't forget you are working with variance (luck) here, so the difficulty can change +/- 3% without any hashrate change, just by probability of finding blocks...

This is what I am talking about: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=619438.0

Well price is starting to factor in now as well
We might see a decrease after all because people are starting to go offline with older gear
Off set by some new gear but maybe at a rate less than whats going off either way this will be small

That's true up to a point. But miners are like speculators, they'll keep running their gear at a loss with hopes that the price of BTC will rebound.

I'm mining at a loss with BTC hovering at ~$300 but I haven't shut anything off that's 1w/GHs or less. And I'll keep running for a couple of more weeks to a month unless BTC dumps under $200... then everything goes in the trash, lol.

Jeebus, this sucks though! Please Jeebus, can we have another Thanksgiving miracle this year?  :D

I sure hope so
Otherwise were going back to the 250 dollar peak and thats really testing the waters of 2011
Means one hell of a rise though when the market gets back to snuff and adjusts from all that downward pressure.

On the bright side more hash in new gear to offset the price
Be interesting to see how the mining gear companies react to it

Hash Rate    301,530,044.97 GH/s
over 50ph with a flip of a switch!

LE: now at 315,314,275.60 GH/s

Looks as if your prediction is coming true.

Looks like you were right

amazing that people are adding gear as price is now under 300 usd.  I purchased 1 coin today. My new idea is buy a coin a day as long as price keeps dropping. I am now close to the most coins I have ever had on hand.

Not really that amazing... cheap power ($0.01-$0.03) still proves to turn a profit even if the price of BTC stays at $285 with 10% jumps.  Manufacturers with access to both cheap hardware and cheap power can continue adding gear and still make profit for quite some time yet.

yeah true.  if asicminer and bitmaintech can build s-3's and long tubes for cheap and pay under 3 cents a kwatt diff can go 3x before they really get hurt.

if they put a 1th on line in their mine for 150 usd it runs a profit.  even at 250 usd a coin.  I think both asic miner and bitmaintech can do the chart below in house

http://imagizer.imageshack.us/v2/1280x1024q90/913/XKTuD9.png

I'd say it's definitely possible if the price keeps decreasing.

We're seeing the effect of how the price affects difficulty. Low price has caused people to buy fewer miners and/or turn them off. My 2 J/GH miners are idle ATM until the price goes way up or I need some heat this winter.

The next diff jump should be small, I really do not see it going negative.

Already got a little cold where I am at. My power bill is gonna be going wayyyyy down with no AC running.

Yes - our market is also pretty sure. The likelyhood is between 3% and 0.01% percent.
Currently you would get more than 20times your money back if you predict a decrease:

https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/difficulty-will-decrease-on-next-change/

most likely is a difficulty around 36B. That is more or less currently 50/50 if it is above or under.
https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/next-difficulty-36b/

it seems an average of 5% increase, and i cant understand, how difficulty is still increasing with these btc prices.

Because people are still adding hash to the network.  Those with cheap electricity and cheap hardware still turn a profit even at the decreased price of BTC.

Great thread.

So I had a chat with a 40 year veteran of the US Electric Power Industry over the weekend and based on what he was telling me, getting power in the US for under 3 cents sustained is next to impossible. You can get it in shifts, during off peak, do peak shaving and other tricks of the trade but here is the bottom line, at least in the US:

Generators will make more selling into the 'market' and to the ISO's even if it means taking generation offline. The example was that if a generator can generate power at 1 cent per Kwh and a miner came to them with a 40MW requirement and said they would pay 2 cents (100% margin), the gerator woul turn it down because they can get 7 cents per Kwh in the market someplace else. There are a bunch of other regulations that add to the reasons why buying direct can't or won't happen anytime soon.

I asked why not build a power plant and plug in a data center/mining operation into it and get a direct feed - regulation and the fact that you would need to have two generating plants for redundancy and your costs double. If you had grid tie in or wanted grid tie in to sell excess or to provide back up load, the regulations REALLY kick in and are prohibitive.

So the notion of continuous cheap power is a notion, at least in the US from what I was told, again from a guy who remembers the first NERC and FERC meetings.

The second thing I just looked at was hash rate to difficulty ratio growth for the last 6 months and the hash rate has gone up 5.5 times in the past 6 months while the difficulty has risen 4.3 times according to the data on blockchain.info I looked at. So the hash rate is growing ahead of the difficulty still, which leads me to believe that is a good thing and money can still be made but you need to go big (decimegawatt scale, 10MW at a time) and throw as much hash rate while the difficulty slips... Right?


 

 the idea in bold is wrong.

basically  the current diff number is a 'real number'  

 any and all hashrate numbers are guesses and estimates.  

the next diff number will be based on the time it took to do 2016 blocks (maybe 2116 as I had a beer or two tonight)     so the diff number is always a true number and hashrate is a guess based on how fast you are making blocks.

Think of it like this. box cars or a pair of sixes with dice are a diff of 35 to 1 .   So if I had 1 guy toss 1 pair of dice 10 times an hour  it will take him a while to toss  'boxcars' or 6 + 6 .     with normal luck it takes about 3.5 hours or 36 tosses to do it.

 but if that guy tossed boxcars on ten tosses in a row. he would do 10 sets of ' boxcars ' in 1 hour  .

 it would make you think they were a few more guys tossing a few more pair of dice to get that many 6 + 6 tosses in only 1 hour .

your hashrate estimate would be very high

Phil, you in AC playing craps to come up with that analogy? :)

not since I joined a program.

In order for miners to continue to be profitable on an operating basis they will need to have ever additional cheap electricity as difficulty increases, and this is exaggerated as the price of bitcoin goes down. Miners will also be hesistant to add additional capacity to their farms as the price of bitcoin goes down as the lower the price of bitcoin is the less of a chance they will be able to ROI on their additional investment

The lesson that few home miners will take away from this little human experiment in greed, is that if bitcoin was to have succeeded then the movement should have spent the greater part of its time growing the use and implementation of bitcoin around the globe. Instead the bitcoin movement has obsessed with an arms race for lions share of the hashrate and lost out to the hardware providers whom the movement created, resourced via this misguided use of peoples time and energy to create this abomination that is now the industrial mining complexes that circle the globe.

Industrial mining farm are stil very profitable. Here is a nice graph user Puppet posted in several threads:

btc is back up to 376 usd.  and diff is going to be very close to .5%

So with all said and done mining does not look too bad today. punch in  those numbers and s-3's look better.

well, new difficulty is in - sorry OP, no difficulty decrease after all :)

old difficulty:	34,661,425,924
new difficulty:	35,002,482,026
% change:	+0.9839644299

Bummer  :'(

if it pulls 1 or  2  percent for the next few diff jumps and coins stay above 360 usd it is not a disaster for miners just yet.

I wish (as im sure you do too) you had more players. The spread on the bets is large, and 1 btc bet can push the entire market way off.

Yap, you are 100% right. However, we nearly finished our API. https://www.fairlay.com/Api
With this it will be possible to program a simple script that calculates probabilities from live hash rates and places predictions accordingly to this. This would give market makers the chance to earn some money with the spread. As soon as we have more then one they will compete for the lowest spread and then this will become the best source for difficulty predictions. At least that is our plan/hope :)

If you have any suggestions what we can improve let us know! And if anyone with basic programming knowledge is interested in using the API we are happy to help and give early access.

Its fate was sealed 4 blocks before the end (based on 2015 blocks - hurrah for bugs?); after that block, even if the others had taken 1 hour and 10 minutes each (roughly the longest time between blocks in this stretch), difficulty would still have gone up, and the odds of that happening are of course very slim :)

There's always next time, though ;)

yes wait until next year. or in this case next jump!http://cdn.macrumors.com/vb/images/smilies/blackapple.png

;D

( I was, of course, referring to the Bitcoin difficulty retargeting being based on the last 2015 blocks, not the last 2016 blocks (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46498.msg555372#msg555372), due to a bug in the code that was never fixed.  There's some other anomalies that can further offset the difficulty by a tiny smidgen. )

The next difficulty change is also slated to be much smaller then the previous increases have been so far this year. As per bitcoinwisdom (https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty) the next difficulty is expected to increase by ~4% the next time it changes.

I think we may have hit a turning point in difficulty increases as the additional profitability is starting to wane for adding additional hashpower to the network

It's way too soon after the last adjustment to make any assumptions. The early predictions are usually very inaccurate.

It will be under 10% for sure unless coins go up.  I am convinced they  are holding back hash and hoping coins go up in price. 

 But frankly WTF do I know, not much when it comes to the top 5 builders of asics stock on hand.

There is still some hash that may come online for now
At the least in the long run a higher hash per price ratio will occur so we might still see difficulty rise
Something like if price is 500 price per gh is 1 dollar
If price was 300 price per gh is 60 cents to keep it equal meaning more hash offered or units get a discount.

Anyways doesn't look a decrease for now.

So it  looks like a slow increase of 5% or so.  My thoughts are 5%-9% will be close to most increases from now on.
 Unless we get BTC fiat jumps.

Builders are still making money  with the small diff jump model for now.

Or technical improvements leading to significantly better J/GH or GH/s$, some of which are already in the pipeline.

Those take time. At least 3 months from tape out and no future generation chip has taped out yet.

you need a solid watt savings.  right now .6 watts is the gold bar. 

  so  a jump  down to .4 watts does not cut it.

A jump down  to 0.15 - 0.3 watts  a hash has  real meaning.

I Still think late feb is optimistic  to think we see a real .2 watt machine.

   Remember gpus were 333 watts a gh     we now are at .8 a gh  (s-3 at the wall)   that was a 400x improvement.

so .8 to .2 would be nice but not the same by any means.   

wisdom says that

Bitcoin Difficulty:   35,002,482,026
Estimated Next Difficulty:   36,073,113,817 (+3.06%)

and it is decreasing, we need to wait 1275 Blocks, About 8.8 days, to see what will happen..

Right now a 1 TH/s, .6 J/GH machine looks like this:

Income @ $410/btc: $180/mo
Expense @ $.10/kwh: $43/mo

There's still significant profit potential at the current conditions.

The chances for a decrease are very small. For sure less than 3%...

Yeah but from the asic companies view point it is a tight margin if they want  to make another 20 or 30ph data center.

Just think  what happens if coins drop to 300 or 280 usd.   For now restriction of production new data centers while mining your current data center in theory  would drive the price of btc up.  They could only sell some to miners at high prices

( s-3's and s4's both high prices)  also (sp20's and sp35's) 

 BTW asicminer is selling long tubes (low price)  but they are late to ship. So it  sounds to me like these builders have conference calls.

 Then stop building data centers for 30 to 60 days.   Hoping coins move to 500 usd or more.


Please Remember this is the speculation section so guessing about shit and making up scenarios is fun to do.

I think it will go up! On blockchain there are few new farms, and in between this motherfucker:

https://blockchain.info/blocks/88.208.1.25

There is a balance: high btc price=higher difficulty, low btc price=low difficulty.
I hope for the later but btc price can go to 1k this month... or down to 200$...

This is true, however you need to remember that miners will be making a long term investment when buying an additional miner. If a miner does not think that conditions will stay the way they are for long enough then they will not purchase an additional miner to add to their farm. One example as to why a miner would not add to their farm is they think the price will continue to decline, or are unsure as to how much the price will increase in the future, or that they think the difficulty will increase quicker then they would be allowed to ROI or that the price of electricity will increase over time. 

OP, you forgot to revive this thread! ;)
63 more blocks to go, currently projected difficulty adjustment (at bitcoinwisdom): -0.56%

   Please don't fucking jinx us.  ::)

 That reads   too harsh in print.   I mean it funny not harsh.


Frankly It would be cool to see in as a - 0.1%   and not a + 0.2% !! :)

Imagine seeing 0.00% .. when's the last time that happened? ;)

I would like that !

Dec 02 2014
40,007,470,271
-0.73%
286,384,627 GH/s

well, it went down!

works for me.

It seems odd that so few understand the dynamics of exponential growth on even a basic level.

The difficulty level cannot continue to double every few months forever. You can start with the laws of thermodynamics, and realize that in just a 5 more years of doubling it would utilize the entire energy output of the sun for hashing with even quantum computing. It had to stop increasing at that rate, and it did.

Additionally, from a commercial standpoint, many endeavors were built with a specific BTC/$ value. If you built out a large mining operation based upon $500/btc you are bleeding and will probably shut down in the near future. However, if you bought a miner for your home and are running it, you are dancing in the street. You can watch the $/btc rate jump from $100 to $1000 and back to $100 and afford to keep hashing. You can hold pretty much forever, unlike an ongoing major mining concern. And when the difficulty steadfastly refuses to increase, the life of your gear just got extended, and so does your ROI.

My crystal ball predicts a movement towards decentralization of mining. Larger mines find it difficult of survive large $/btc swings for extended periods.

PS: Try running a mining calculator on some current devices where the difficulty increases around 2% per cycle and see what happens. It's raining ROI like never before for devices you can have delivered in a few days on the secondary market. Expect prices on second-hand devices to go through the ceiling shortly. Even at current prices, a 1Th machine with 1KW usage will make around $85/month after electricity costs. Projections at 2% per cycle says 100% ROI in 3 months, and profits continue well into 2016.

I disagree with most everything you said. Yes, growth of the network had to slow eventually. But home miners are still incredibly disadvantaged compared to large scale mining operations especially the ones who design and build their own miners and enjoy extremely low electricity rates.

Hobbyist home miners may be able to continue to mine at a loss if they have lots of excess income and/or super cheap electricity. But a more serious miner with a significant investment in a home mining operation can't continue to profit with average electricity costs. They'll soon face serious losses.

For example, I don't have much excess income at the moment and need to sell BTC every month to pay ridiculously high electricity bills. I'm lucky if I break even and my electricity costs are only .11/kWh. I certainly won't continue mining when I'm in the negative. And I'm definitely not the only person who is in this situation. I can afford to keep a couple of my most efficient machines running but the vast majority of my gear will get tossed in the bin when that day soon arrives.

You are a microcosm of why small miners will reap benefits. As you are forced out, those who do not need to sell BTC to continue mining will find their ROI increasing as the difficulty increases decline. I think you just much proved my point. I (or someone like me) will likely buy your gear at a discount and be quite happy.

I think another consideration for the commercial operations is they are not data centers. Or even homes. So I suspect they have a higher hardware mortality rate, further reducing ROI.

If you've already bought the hardware, the only thing that matters is running costs vs dollar value of the bitcoins mined. People will stop buying new hardware long before they switch off old gear.

I actually look forward to seeing hashing units back online at this rate of growth
(Honestly first time in a long time I have even considered looking at mining)
Stable generation and cheap units with to my knowledge little in way of new units for a while means their is a chance at ROI given the lower bitcoin prices and the stable difficulty.

That said it was a heck of a long rise this time around.

So, it appears that as long as the $/BTC exchange rate stays where it is, the difficulty growth should remain (somewhat) low, as there is very little incentive for large concerns to spend the capital on building/converting/renovating facilities and procuring the miners with which to fill them... Makes sense... I guess we'll see how that plays out.

It would be nice for the home miner to actually achieve a positive ROI.

That would be a pretty damn cool
Last time that happened was when difficulty was 1 or perhaps that period after the difficulty finally increased from 1 for a bit lol.

+1 we're heading into a decentralization of mining stage - untill the next price growth spurt.

if the price sits around this level for a while I think mining equipment cost will drop.

Over the last 2 months I think many got a ROI on hardware costs. I think you're bang on when it comes to centralized mining, they won't invest big untill there is a big opportunity - not happening at this price point.

_____

on a separate note does anyone have any ideas as to why difficulty is dropping so much? 
Are those southern hemisphere miners powering down for the summer? (no need for the old heater!) 

Being that this is the speculation section I would speculate that since few manufacturers have recently created new (and more efficient) hardware as well as the fact that the price of bitcoin has declined (which has caused the effective, after electric cost amount that miners to mine to decline) 

I totally agree with your speculation but the energy input cost is still well below market price, so given all, I'd expect it to stabilize or increase with the increase of new hardware sales. Declining (maybe this decline is just noise) is not happening and difficulty is just stagnant.