Bitcoin Forum

Right after the difficulty jump, we see an almost instant 25% jump in hashrate. Do you think some big player are not deploying hardware before the difficulty increase to manipulate it?

Does that makes sense or I understand difficulty adjustment wrongly?

Estimating the next difficulty change right after a change has happened is very inacurate.

Of course it's being manipulated! The big miners and mining corporations are doing every trick in the book to get the most profit out of the game. It's the 1% who are doing the monst damage to the rest (the 99%) of us.

This is why I dread seeing Scrypt FPGA and ASIC!

Not sure -- in the past week the network has swung from 3 PH/s to 4,5 back to 3,1 again, and now we're at 3,6 PH/s. Some rigs are coming online, with some hiccups, but there's no evidence anyone is 'manipulating'.

If anyone was in charge of a large rig -- the gentlemanly thing to do would be to shut down right before a difficulty jump -- and then switch on again. This would maximize profits both for him and the whole network, but I really doubt anyone is pulling such stunts.

That's not how difficulty works. The size of the adjustment is based on the speed with which the previous 2016 blocks have been mined. If that was 10% too fast (so 6.6 blocks per hour instead of 6), difficulty will go up by 10%, etc...

Turning hardware off right before a difficulty jump only has a tiny effect on the size of the adjustment. With the current constatly rising hashrate, the hashrate at the start of each difficulty period is lower than at the end of it, so the difficulty adjustment does not fully compensate for all the new hashing power yet, which is why just after a difficulty adjustment, you'll often see estimates for the new difficulty already being up to 20% or more.

Some switch to alt coins when they are more profitable so that's why you see drops in the hash rate.

There is no point in manipulating unless you have like 80% of network hashrate and you want it dead for some reason....

There is no strategy that will work.

Any time that you intentionally throttle back your hash rate you lose... period.

Dozens of convoluted strategies have been formulated and tried and in all cases they screw you. The only effective way to manipulate the difficulty is by somehow sabotaging your competition so that THEY are the ones who are throttling back their hash rates. See 50BTC for a practical case study.

No point in manipulating, its luck factor sometimes...