Bitcoin Forum

A huge leap. Is this 'organic' or is it somehow part of the 2x plan to kill off the old chain with a fatally elongated readjustment period?

What do you think?

Have no idea. But I believe hashrate increases are generally a positive sign.

Could it have been miners who were mining BCH coming back over to BTC?

Christ what a huge spike. Hopefully the price adjusts along with this and we can all make bank.

I don't think the hashing power lines up with the amount of people that left BCH. There's got to be another explanation. Idk what though.

it is because of price rise!
when it is rising, bitcoin mining becomes more and more profitable every day to a point where it is super profitable :D
if you look at the difficulty chart for the past 9 months for example (https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty) you can see that it has had jumps like this in the past. i don't know the percentages (too lazy to calculate) but the size of the vertical red line is nearly the same in mid September and now. there have also been other jumps which were considerable.

i remember reading they released a new ASIC miner last month but i can no find it in the news. so if anyone has more information, he can add it here. but if i am true, that can be one of the reasons for this jump.

It's a viscous cycle that's great for HODLERS. Price rise causes hash power to increase and hash power increase causes price to increase!

Yup, same thoughts here.  The miners have been using BCH like a whore, coming when the money was good and immediately leaving as soon it stops being profitable.

Isn't it time for BCH to be pumped?  It's looking very 'ripe' for a pump right now.

I don't think it could be part of the Segwit 2x plan. This would increase confirmation times and time to find new blocks, but it wouldn't kill the old chain. As others have said - I think it is market related. New mining capacity coming in and miners moving from BCH.

À higher difficulty means more hashpower in the network and a higher bitcoin price. I hope this is just the difficulty adjusting to the market price and miners moving over to bitcoin once again. That would be a great thing for the legacy chain I believe. I'm eager to see how this will affect the market.

Don't take this bump as a organic growth in the bitcoin difficulty chart. We all expects big information about the bitcoin gold in hard fork day but big happened this time. No big guns spoken about Bitcoin gold since they had a many chat and pinned news when the Bitcoin cash splitted up. We need to be alert and stop selling the bitcoins we have in our wallet. It will be done by all the bitcoin users means big bump happen again and again.

Hashrate follows price!
Therefore due to the price rise we've seen, more hashpower got plugged in to the system and again therefore difficulty has increased!

Since BTC price is high,mining would be more profitable and hence more miners who supported BCH may have switched their hash power to BTC.That's why,difficulty has jumped to 21%.

But we should also not forget that these miners who earlier supported BCH have signed NYA and very soon,the next month,they may switch their hash power in support of segwit 2x.

Since segwit2x has more miner support,it may succeed over the legacy chain.

It could just be natural growth where the price and interest has been well up for a while now.  If the diffculty doesn't catch up it will mean too many miners are making easy money.

you kill the old chain with a bunch of gradual steps. you don't kill it stone dead instantly.

you make it unattractive to mine and use by making it slow and expensive. it's a snowball effect. once a few people abandon it then more join. before you know it it's having its life support turned off.

no one thinks a move of this magnitude isn't slightly aligned with the upcoming fork?

It is somehow reosonable. Bitcoin value is rising fastly, and since BTc value and difficulty are related, it is logic that difficulty rises too.
When the price rises, more miners will join which leads to a jump in mining difficulty. Let's hope that this  jump in difficulty will not cause a dump in Bitcoin price.

This. Also, this might be segwit2x related. Make the hashrate surge. Then switch to BCH, allow the time between blocks on bitcoin to lengthen, causing backlogs, in order to push for segwit2x as a solution.

Exactly we don't need to worry about that if the hashrate is increased. Of course miners are coming back after realizing that the real boss is still BTC and is the best option to mine than any other.

the actual price adjustment must be done immediately, because it only benefits many parties, especially if we see their income (including me) using the services of the campaign signature becomes unstable, and some are becoming changed, and maybe it will persist
therefore price adjustment from BTC is very important

seems like that,
i figure it out too because a day ago many miners moved their mining to BCH and because of that a lot of confirmation delayed or untouched.
it's a good sign in my opinion and they may be preparing themself for 2x or may be not.
not sure what is going on exactly but at least it's a positif sign from the miners right now,

I am surprised at your optimism. You probably think that the office segwit2x will be as safe as it was with bitcoin bitcoin in cash and gold. No, it will have much more impact. I generally don't like change. I loved it all. But it seems to me that this time segwit2x can create outflow of investment from bitcoin and the price may drop.

Who defines the level of difficulty? Bitmain?

I am very worried that this is Bitmain setting us up for catastrophe next month. What if they drove up difficulty, knowing that they can easily control a majority of the hash rate, making the likelihood of chain death on the legacy chain higher given how difficult it will be to find blocks?

We could even take the conspiracy a step further. What if the plan is to drive difficulty up on both the legacy and 2x chains, only to withdraw hash power from both chains and point it at Bitcoin Cash? Surely it would look like an attack by Bitmain, but they've already been pretty open about their preference for BCH over BTC, and they might not have to 51% attack either chain if difficulty is high enough. This would force users of both chains to contemplate a hard fork of the POW/difficulty algo, or otherwise migrate to Bitcoin Cash.

the bitcoin algorithm decides. the more miners there are the harder it becomes. bitmain probably has the most mining power so they have the most influence over upping mining difficulty.

This is part of the Sw2x team to kill off bitcoin core.

Expect another similar adjustment before the fork.

Since they have 94% miner support (even higher if you consider how much mining power they are themselves directing at the core chain right now to bump up the difficulty) such a high difficulty on the core network will guarantee a success for SW2x team and instantly kill the entire bitcoin core network.

Well they have long returned mining bitcoin after BCH became unprofitable due to difficulty increases. Also the moment that there's a large spike in diffculty all I can come up with is that there are new mining hardware that's being tested by a mining company since that was the case in the last two years or so. Today it might be that the miners are just following where the money is or whatever is profitable at a given time.

What's your opinion on the outcome of the fork then? Do you think some or all of the Core developers would back a POW change for the legacy chain if the network was completely stuck? I get the impression that Core is not onboard with simply continuing to develop Bitcoin after this sort of hostile takeover.

Knowing your style, I'm guessing you are bearish on the price as well? Where do you see the price of BTC, B2X and whatever altcoin might emerge from a dead legacy network, next year?

Yes it is insane, this is not profitable anymore for bitcoin miners at the moment. anyway, it has rised a lot, so they were making a lot of profit from the increase + the bitcoins that they used to mine.
So it was time for it to happen, anyway, it can be a complot, today there have been a lot of issues about Segwitx2 fork and about their developer's team, they are so shady and they want to make bitcoin go do at all cost. Maybe you should try to take a look at this, maybe that is the real reason behind all this problem.

Maybe bitmain increased the difficulty, they are going to release a new antminer and that is probably why they have rised it, because they want to increase their sales on their new miner.. It seems to be possible, but it is just a coincidence.. I dont believe in coincidences, but maybe it is true.
but yes, it was time to make it happen, bitcoin miners were taking a lot of profit.. i hope that the fees are going to be lowered after this mess.

I read a lot of conspiracies about this during the past few days, and a lot of people were predicting that this was going to happen because bitcoin rised a lot in the last weeks.
Just think about it, it was $4000 two weeks ago, and now it is upto $5700 each bitcoin (more than 20%) and bitcoin miners were making a lot of profit. Some people say that this is because the new product from bitmain, and others because of the price, and some people because of the next fork.
The whole community is crazy

Lol. Which came first, the hash power or the price? Haha like what came first, the chicken or the egg? I don't think there's any way to figure out over time what would come first.

Well i would assume that difficulty rises it is a precursor to bitcoin's price jumping up as well.

However jumping 21% at a time is completely abnormal and probably won't be sustained into the future. There has been no movement of price since yesterday, so i'm really doubting this correlation is true.


Exactly. Maybe it's the pump of price that resulted in this.

Further lol, now tell me which came first, girls came and then people jumped them or people were jumping and girls came? please laugh for 5 seconds.
Best thing to do right now to prevent emperor Wu jumping us all is to change how difficulty is adjusting, they did the same thing with Bitcoin cash, they lowered the difficulty, what I'm suggesting is not to lower it but reduce the time of adjustment from 2 weeks to 48 hours.
Also Bitmain is not just one miner, there are thousands of small miners using their pools for more profit, if Bitmain tries something against the interests of the whole network, people will stop using their pools.

Russia started mining bitcoin!

It's pretty easy. Miners could mine an unknown fork with no users. Would anyone buy the coins just because they mined them? Of course not! Hash power follows price.

That's not to say that it's perfectly efficient; miners are rational actors, but they are not always correct in their assumptions about users and network activity. I do think that some people watch for increases in the hash rate as indication of investment. After all, this indicates investment in mining hardware, which is indirect investment in BTC -- bullish. But that doesn't change the fundamental relationship. A rational miner buys mining hardware because he expects the price to rise.

Probably has to do with the price appreciation recently. However, becuase of this, no matter the price, the profits always seem to be the same. Some will stop after a price correction and the difficulty migt reduce, again keeping the profit constant.

As some others have already stated, this is most probably because of the price increase. The higher the price, the profitabler mining becomes.

But yeah, 21% is quite a lot.

a percentage like that is not normal and the price has stopped rising. it also coincides with multiple fork dramas and people circling who have a great incentive to usurp the original bitcoin blockchain and now is the ideal moment to attempt it.

it all seems a little too neat not to be the case to me but maybe i'm being paranoid.

Bitcoin is self-regulating system. Its creators have worked very well and probably figured almost everything. But it seems to me that the most vulnerable part of bitcoin is the greed of miners. The increasing complexity creates the conditions under which bitcoin can't do without a monopoly of miners.

You must be psychic. :P

False.

No one will ever move to Bcash!
And if Bitmain indeed should have the balls to di such an attack, let's get it on!
The core devs have for such a scenario emergency back up plans!
Yes this would be a tough time however after it we would show the entire world how resilient Bitcoin is to such actors!!
You wanna do shenanigans and play against the rules, well then face and take consequences afterwards as well.
I'm not worried!!

Why there are so many conspiracy theories regarding changes in bitcoin mining difficulty.
We cannot pinpoint exactly who and why caused difficulty to increase but that is nothing to worry about IMO.
Current really high bitcoin's price is the reason more and more people/companies/services are pursuing mining.
If you think that will cause people switch to bitcoin cash or gold instead you are being silly...

The competition of these so called bitcoin and its "HF" coins are becoming unhealthy if it's really an attack from some parties that support specific coin carrying different ideologies
from the bitcoin core.
21% is not a little amount of increase considering the difficulties right now that already overwhelming due to many miners joining. such unfortunate.
However, I'm pretty sure that people behind this so called bitcoin core already think about this since the start and maybe have the solution?

In addition to new SHA256 miners joining the fray, these miners are also probably jumping back and forth between BTC and BCH, depending on what is currently more profitable.

Now that BCH is going up again, I wouldn't be surprised if the next difficulty change would be negative.

Because people love them. It's of course impossible to prove, but I suspect the Jihan cartel to have something to do with this. It's in their benefit to discredit Bitcoin, 'slow down' Bitcoin, etc. It's not for nothing that Antpool has been minting a few near empty blocks yesterday (they have a habit of doing so from time to time to troll the users), and that while there were a huge load of transactions waiting to get their first confirmation. To add, did you even notice that the average generation time for a single block has gone up to almost 14 minutes? And that while blocks should get found close to once every 10 minutes on average. High difficulty changes, and that in a frequent manner, causes blocks to take longer to be found than usual. Regardless of whoever is behind this, and whether or not it's legit growth, or purely an attempt to troll Bitcoin, its effect is being noticed.

i have never been inspired to give mining difficulty much thought before. but right now incentives are aligning in a very particular way and this jump in difficulty fits neatly into that.

the creation of bch is a one giant attempt to troll and hijack bitcoin. the creator of that also has the most mining power to do the same to bitcoin itself and they're now doing it.

The segwit2x plan consists on a teamed up Coinbase+miners bribed mining at a loss during 48 hours in order for Coinbase to list, and stick to, the BTC tag for the segwit2x chain. In other words, they will list B2X as BTC which will be really confusing for noobs. Their excuse will be that the highest difficulty was on their side for these 48 hours that their arbitrarily choose as a threshold. This is of course because of the ongoing bribes.

We'll see how this resolves, but I can see serious class actions and subpoenas coming for Coinbase.

You just can't trust exchanges, not a single one. Control your keys and interact with them as minimum as possible. Get your money in and out and avoid giving them your personal information, they are crooks.

I do not think the Coinbase will rename the Bitcoin based on the 48 hour result. It should be at least two weeks to let the market decide.

That may very well be the case, however I would like it if they left bitcoincash permanently. Bitcoin cash did bounce up again but if you look at the bigger picture things aren't looking great. Difficulty is directly related to the amount of hashingpower in the network so I hope miners are dedicating more hashing power to the main (lagacy) chain rather than mining bitcoin cash.

If it's slow and expensive that it's actually attractive to mine because it means more fees for miners - and as more miners come in, the network returns to it's maximum speed of 1 block every 10 minutes. And BCH has proven that you can't easily damage Bitcoin by introducing competing chain to bribe miners with its profitability - this is hard to sustain and the market seemed to not care at all about disruptions in Bitcoin's network. Of course SegWit2x will try something similar, but eventually mining economics and the market will sort everything out and Bitcoin will be a winner again.