Bitcoin Forum

If difficulty is linked to price, then difficulty should be falling faster. Some developer must have coded things wrong
because price is collapsing and difficulty is flatlining. We want sub-million difficulty!

Basically, I want difficulty right down so I can mine thousands of BTC then when the price goes shooting up, after the
banks collapse, I can roll in an ermine-clad Bentley wearing a crown and playing loud rap-music.

Guess what, ... IT'S NOT !

End of the story.

It is, but not in a linear up-down fashion. As with many things in life, it's complicated.  This response goes to the OP as well.

Didnt you guys notice who the op is? Im pretty sure he suggested resting powersupplys to boost hashrates and to leave the fridge open to cool mining rigs or something...trolls be trollin

Quit your hating, cave man!

OP has a valid point, difficulty levels should be dropping faster as price tanks!

lulz

ermmm dude... block production has been well below 6 per hour for over 24 hours now.... 2 difficulty re-targets per day like SC seems like a good idea right now.

Did you forget to take your Abilify and Lithium pills again?

I have been watching.  no it is /has not  been below 6 the whole time.  look at now! (6.44 per hour)

Sep 9, 2011 20:28:50 (UTC)
Difficulty   1779164
Estimated   1725489 in 483 blks
Network total   13.671 Thash/s
Blocks/hour   6.44 / 559 s

Difficulty will only drop when people actually stop mining.  Difficulty is not linked directly to price in any way at all.  It's linked to network/block solving speed.  The only link is indirect that when people decide it's not worth it to mine, they'll stop mining, which will then drive the network power down and eventually the difficulty will drop.

Just because the price has tanked, doesn't mean people have stopped and we're still hovering near 13 TH right now.  I'd bet a most folks will continue to mine at least until they get their next power bill in the hope the price will turn around.  If we still see the price of BTC $6 or less in a month, then you'll probably start seeing a more movement in difficulty, but it's not going to swing immediately.

Difficulty will drop in due time.

Difficulty will remaim the same if the network hashing power stays the same, no matter the price.

When network hash rate falls, so will the difficulty, and it is proportional.

cheers

I agree with the fact that the difficulty should be dropping much faster than it is at the moment.I mine on SC and when difficulty drops to less than 1000 I CPU mine the I0coins while GPU mining SCs to maximise the use of my 2 comps without spending extra.Have you ever noticed how the difficulty on I0coins and SC drops quite a bit if some people stop mining them for even 2 days? I know this isn't related to BTC but I think BTC should follow the model of SC when it comes to difficulty management but some people can then say that BTC needs to stay the way it is.I stopped mining BTC directly over a month ago and mine alternative currencies to trade for BTC which I then exchange for money.

I think that if more people use BTC for trading for good and services again,that the value will actually rise properly,instead of now where it rises a bit then drops again.I'm selling one of my artwork designs on my blog and can be purchased with BTC as I wish to experience what it's like to be a trader/business as well as a speculative miner/investor in BTC.To find this,access my blog and look for the post that mentions it.This is a first time so don't expect things to be perfect but certainly any comments (positive or constructive critisism) will be welcome.The comments section is however moderated to stop spammers on there so I hope this helps.

Is there a site/community that deals with the creative side of things? As I don't know any of them (deviant art pays a small 20% to it's artists and 80% it keeps for itself).

Thanks

For the difficulty to go down  you need a drop in the number of miners thus decreasing the hashrate thus decreasing the number of coins being mined.

The code has nothing to do with it, other than to make the correct call based on the number of coins being generated. And only a decrease in the required number of coins will result in a decrease in difficulty.

In theory, in this mining world, if the price drops then people would be expected to leave, thus coin generation decreases, thus difficulty decreases. But in reality people are stubborn and unwilling to give up or step back and reassess the situation.

Jeez, I think I just talked a load of b£&*^ks
I'm confused, lol

^Exactly.  ;)

good luck convincing any of them that

The fact that difficulty only dropped a wee bit after two weeks just confirms that it wouldn't have dropped any quicker if re-targetted quicker. The thing that faster re-targetting does is try to ensure that miners will still mine when price drops precede difficulty. That's useful for a coin that has little support that may vanish quickly. But Bitcoin has not been having that problem so far, so obviously so far, faster re-targetting would make no difference.

Difficulty has only an indirect relationship with price since it's filtered through miner psychology.

the algorithm is designed to "smooth" things out in the long run.  time is key here.

this is by design.

also, if the difficulty was to drop much faster, then you would also end up with an increase just as fast. presumably from all those who would get right back in with lower difficulty.
so then difficulty would jump alot quickly.

in the end, you'd have a net gain of what?

zero

It seems likely that there is less chance that people will stop mining in the high difficulty periods and start in the low periods if the changes comes frequently. If the difficulty starts fluctuating like it does with namecoins the cycle will be self reinforcing. A noticable drop in difficulty will make people add more than the current amount of mining power. When the difficulty change comes it will increase to more than the current amount, making it even less profitable than it is now. That makes the next difficulty drop even larger, and the next increase larger than the first. With many days between the changes instead of hours it is much easier to adapt to this cycle of turning miners on and off.

imo we are pretty much done in terms of difficulty drop -> the next adjustment will go up again.
Reason being those who dropped out because of price did already.

We are not in no matter what territory yet but for a significant outflow of miners there would have to happen more than a price stagnation within the trendline. If there were another scandal (if the recent mtgox hack turns out to be severe, another bruce wanger incident or something) people would loose confidence.

Do you have any data to back up your conclusion?

Each difficulty decrease was lower in magnitude than the last one both in absolute and relative magnitudes. The next one would be smaller than the network variance over the expected time period. Sorry that is all I can give you, but I think it is significant enough to draw a conclusion.

I think difficulty will continue to increase for the following reason: mining will shift off people doing it deliberately, on to somebody else's dime.  That includes miners mining in places where electricity is included in the rent, or where the mining is done on somebody else's computer without their knowledge (including botnets and "browser mining").  And a notable mention for purchased electricity that is "free" because it would have gone to heating.

Didn't I just see a posting in here from a game author wondering how he could embed a Bitcoin miner into his GPU-intensive game without taking away from graphics performance?

Yep,
The weather is a changin' in the good ol' USA! Cold fronts, rain, soon snow, and me warming by the ice-blue glow of my miners. Ahhh, a little slice of heaven right there. Really, what else could anybody want?

Except that I believe most homes in the US are heated by natural gas because it costs about 1/3 as much for the same amount of heat.  So it'll work for some people, but won't be cost effective for others if they have to compete with miners for whom cost is no concern.  At least however the electricity is cheaper in many places in the winter compared to the summer.  All my miners are off, by the way... BTC much easier for me to acquire just by buying it.

I'm getting sick of your unscientifically unrobust non-arguements up in here!

Can you type up some numbers and post here to show this?

:)

Please people, if you are going to be unscientific, do it robustly!  ;)

LOL :)

I don't really care about it that much to do this :)

I mine 90% for the fun of it.  So if the prices decrease, it is a minus factor but not much, I enjoy bitcoin as a hobby.  Maybe those who are doing it for the money may be dropping off.  But it depends as long as variable costs is still lower than the bitcoin prices miners will continue.