Bitcoin Forum

Just curious.

take a look here http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ 

i say no way

What if the value of Bitcoin suddenly drops and less people will be mining.
Would that have an effect on the difficulty?

The economical thing put aside. Is it technically possible that the difficulty could decrease or will it always only go up as hash's are getting harder to find?

If you look on the 6th chart on that link you can see the difficulty went down in April.

Yes. The only limits are that it can only increase or decrease by a factor of 4.

yes, if the number of BTC produced per day does not increase

based upon the data at this address...



it looks like the difficulty level has reduced in the past.

I could see it happening if Uncle Sam decides he wants to kill bitcoin by dumping a bunch of computing power into it to make it unprofitable for anyone to mine, then leave once they leave. That's kinda saying the least though. Not sure they'd bother though, at least not for a long while.

Difficulty goes up or down to try to maintain an average of 6 blocks created an hour.

in the past 1 BTC =/=19$

So what? You could say exactly the same thing back then: "in the past 1 BTC =/= 2$"

lol

If it takes more than ~2 weeks to generate 2016 blocks, it'll go down.

Jesus Christ you are a bit slow and you ignore the latest media coverage and miners greed  ;)

Quite the contrary.
No offense, but I think your own greed makes you delusional.
I bet you also think that price depends on difficulty.

Yes. There is a real possibility of a difficulty decrease. Mining is valuable activity, and mining pools have a great opportunity to trade on that value to other proof-of-work block chains, whether those are Namecoin or a bitcoin clone or alternative. With the buy in from a major mining pool, it would be a trivial task to launch a second bitcoin, and the members of that pool would benefit from the cheap coins in the new pool. It would take a while for exchange rates between the two currencies to stabilize and for a while the hashing power would be spread across one or more currencies, lowering the difficulty for bitcoin. Longer term, I suspect that more sophisticated work assignments could be distributed to mining clients. Personally, I'd like to see a distributed AI constructed in such a fashion, but that's just the cognitive psychologist in me speculating!

I would think the only way that will happen is if bitcoin gets some bad press and the value drops to a point where they are worth less then the electric cost to mine. Or maybe people sell their mining rigs after a crash and that lowers the amount of miners. So far the value has been increasing along with the difficulty. It would have to break that trend to lower the difficulty a reasonable amount.

When electricity costs > than mining returns I think you'll see drop, but then the miners will return. :)

Green energy powered rig FTW  8)

i'd like to provide more alternative power to my gaming, er, mining rig.

i do that with my ham radio stuff.  solar for them.....

'monkey

Not gonna happen.

The answer has pretty much been given already. It's technically possible for difficulty to drop but we're not likely to see something like that before miners gets a good reason to stop mining. Like a huge price drop for example.

kinda low compared to the last couple days now
=[

nuffin' to get all worked up over though.....

'monkey