Bitcoin Forum

What are your predictions on rate of difficulty for btc by the end of summer 2013

Today the diff is around 10,000,000


What would you predict the diff would be by the end of this year or a year from now.

I think this belongs in the mining speculation forums.

High enough to make it a bad idea to pay 150 BTC for an ASIC that's for sure.

End of summer, say, Sept 1st, difficult will be 150 million.

End of year, 300 million.

Next year this time 750 million to 1 billion.

when is summer 201?

ASICS weren't invented then, hard to make a prediction based on a past that didn't happen

i was expecting maybe a quarter of these figures but you never kknow i guess.

Current BTC network speed: ≃85TH/s
Current difficulty: ≃10M

Currently on order:

ASICMiner: + 200 TH/s
Avalon: + 18TH/s per batch (3) = + 54TH/s
BFL: + ??? say max 10.000x50GH/s = + 500TH/s (will be less, a mix between 5, 25 and 50GH/s boxes)
Others: roughly equivalent to Avalon (remaining Avalon chips)= + 54TH/s

So:
85TH/s < Future network speed < 893 TH/s
10M < Future difficulty < 110M

I really, really doubt we will see 200TH/s from ASICMiner and +500TH/s from BFL by the end of the summer. I'm more confident ASICMiner could have deployed by the end of the Autumn. If BFL doesn't F Up again, Autumn is a possibility.

By the end of the summer, I think 30-50M is a safe bet but it's based more on a gut feeling than real, hard evidence. I'd need to know the ASIC release rate, exact numbers, when they'll come online, etc. Not going to happen...

Or you could check this:

http://organofcorti.blogspot.be/2013/05/weekly-network-forecast-6th-may-2013.html

Very good blog, IMO, if a bit in need of vulgarization :)

Well today it's 11.2M.

But to answer your question, I have no idea.  Ask this guy as he seems to have the crystal ball at the moment :)

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=203309.msg2124467#msg2124467

This sounds right if all these ship out on time.  The reason being that asics is that much faster and difficulty adjust faster and will adjust as much as hashrate.  Makes sense.  Thats a lot of hashing power.  I wonder how price of btc will be affected by this jump.

Right now, there's roughly a 1:1 increase in price with increase in difficulty (maybe organofcorti has more accurate data on this on his blog already).

So, if diff raises by 10%, BTC/USD raises by 10%.

300 million and that's being conservative.

I just ordered an asics 60ghs unit if 300million then its not enough even with the BFL runnning 50-60ghs

It all depends on BFL shipping devices out to users. If they ship the difficulty will probably increase at least ten times if they don't it might double.

ASIC is slower than most people have been predicting I would say 50-100M by the end of the year tops.

That cant stay the same forever due to elctricity consumption is going down unlike before when it was costlier to mine now when asics is out it will cost less thus price will not be the same as difficulty is should be considerably less than what difficulty is doing otherwise it would not be an equal equation.

I hope so.  There are a lot of people waking up and buying in though, key new markets opening up and all that.
We need to spread the processor power, so it doesn't get too centralized.  Miners are always going on the forum propagandizing against new competition, but forget that the currency will be worth more as it spreads.

Or it will go higher still.

The 1:1 ratio is, I think, dependent of the fact that Bitcoin being in its early stages, the demand far outstrips the supply.

In the long term, if you are a miner, you will need to sell less BTCs to pay for your electricity bill thanks to ASICs consuming less and thus saving you some cost. Which means you will keep more coins for yourself. Less BTCs are thus released in a market that is still growing which will drive the price up.

In the short term, we might see the exact opposite as miners will probably use some of their reserves to pay for said ASICs, pushing more coins in the market and thus driving the price down (but it should only be temporary and depends how fast the ASICs are released - the market might even be able to absorb the BTC influx and we won't see the difference).

So, higher difficulty (higher barrier to entry), less supply, etc. Price will go up.

Even with existing outstanding orders from just Avalon and not even considering BFL's orders, I'm guessing something like 50M. I'm guessing that BFL will continue to kick the can (and people still hold faith) and that Avalon will have some teething issues in batch 3 as they reach a large production rate. Guessing on batch 3 by end of summer making up the bulk of the increase. Don't think the amount of GPU power leaving the pools will matter at all more than 10% of future rate. I think high end GPUs will be able to hold on just through the end of summer and early fall. I'll actually be somewhat embracing of when I quit GPU mining 2x 7970s so I can use my system for some triple monitor eyefinity gaming. I've already broken even on 2 7970s and a PSU so I don't mind too much if the difficulty skyrockets.

Or you could mine other crypto-currencies like litecoins, feathercoins..

Made a chart for this..
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=209750