Bitcoin Forum

I am just wondering if a lot of miners would stop mining (I know this is next to impossible) could the bitcoin difficulty go down instead of up? Thanks

Yes.  It has on more than one adjustment in the past.

Is it likely that it will go down anytime soon?  No.

Yes. That is normal. You can see all time charts of BTC diff and you can clearly see that it just a value that might go up or down.

The only way for it to come down is if BTC price drops to <$5 again and most miners walk away and get real jobs.

Right now, there is so much noise in the media about bitcoin that people are putting new mining hardware online regardless if it makes money or not.

Too much optimism.  Evangelists are projecting $10,000 by the end of 2014.  No way difficulty comes down unless price adjusts dramatically.

Yes of course the difficulty would go down if lots of miners stopped mining. Is it going to happen? Only if price of BTC crashes spectacularly.

price is crashing.  if price went down to 200 that would be great. everyone would shut their rigs off.

do you know what would happen if everyone would shut their rigs off?
do you know how bitcoin works?

this is p2p network.

try to download a torrent with no seeds.

It'll take a pretty impressive price-crash (hint: far lower than $200) for everyone to shut off their rigs.

The limiting factor in earning back your mining investment is the initial cost of purchase, not the ongoing electricity costs. Even at $200 per Bitcoin, almost all current ASICs will produce more income than they cost to keep running. So while a low BTC-price may lower sales of new devices (or a price drop of those new devices), it's not going to cause people to turn off their rigs until things get really crazy.

serious? :) it will stop bitcoin network.

NO bitcoin transaction can be made if hashrate = 0 (all rigs off)

So even if you will have 10000 BTC you cannot sell them. Because blockchain would NOT work.

Let say you have a lamp in your room. When it is on it gives a light. When it is off it does not.

All rigs off implies that every single miner on the planet is doing it for profit, and for no other reason.

I doubt that is true.

yes its possible

Even if the bitcoin price drops very quickly, miners will not react immediately all at the same time. Some will switch off earlier than others, maybe because they're more fearful, maybe because their energy costs are higher. At some point, remaining miners will decide that their best choice is to continue mining because enough miners have left the scene to make mining attractive for the others again. Of course, block rate will go down quite a bit until the next difficulty adjustment, so you might have 1-2 weeks of average 2-3 blocks per hour instead of 6. So what? It's very unlikely that this will happen at all, and even if it does happen, bitcoin transactions will only be slowed down a bit, not stopped.

Onkel Paul

when I said everyone I was speaking figuratively not literally. but captain literal over here went there.

Guess diff will go down a bit in a day :)

but it will change like nothing.

I remember difficulty starting to skyrocket at $100 a coin. Even at $20, people were mining like crazy. Miners will be miners.

I don't see that happening at all.  Forget the dam btc price because it's meaningless to the difficulty.  Right now the hashrate of the network is up to 24,673,812 GH/s and block generation is at 8 minutes.

I still see an over 20% increase tomorrow...there is so much fast hardware being thrown at the network right now because people that pre-ordered equipment months ago are just receiving it so the ongoing disaster on the exchanges doesn't make a difference. No one is going to take their multi-thousand dollar asic and not mine with it.

I assume that the difficulty will keep climbing until the cost of power equals the mining revenue.

New mining equipment consumes about 0.75 kW per TH/s, or 18 kWH/day per TH/s At $0.10/kWH that's $1.80 per day per TH/s. 1 TH/s mines about 0.192 BTC/day and that will equal the power cost when 1 BTC is worth about $10.

So, difficulty will fall if BTC falls below $10, or will stop rising if the price remains at $650 and the difficulty rises by a factor of about 65. Both are possible, but I think neither is likely (at least in the short term).

Most probabl difficulty will continue to rise.

+19%
meh.

I truthfully think it will keep going up. I don't remeber when it went down since I started mining last summer. Hopefully it would go down, but it's still not profitable for me to mine  :-[

Theoretically, yes :)

It will some day. Just not sure when. Perhaps once the market is over saturated and the price can't sustain miners to keep their operation financial able to keep running.

It might have a small blip downward when people turn off the original BFLs/Avalons/ASICMiners - but remember these units put out measly amounts compared to the new beasts.  You turn off 60 SC Singles for every Cointerra rig and you're even.

The only real way to see a drop is maybe a severe price crash or a network issue where many big pools get DDOS or providers go down.

Or my favorite - massive solar ejection wipes all crypto off the map.

If price stays a $600-700 for another 6 months, what are you projections for hashrate/difficulty?
Current upwards almost vertical line is unsustainable if price doesn't catch up.

Once again you are failing to take into consideration that miners have been bought and paid for beyond this point.  When someone gets the miner that they paid thousands of dollars for months and months ago they are turning it on regardless of what the btc to usd price is that day.

If diddicult will go down a lot ;) miners will be so so happy :D because .. it will go up soon for sure.

The only reason is went down with GPUs was because GPUs had an option of doing something other than mining.  As far as I can tell SHA256 are going to be mining coins or going bust.  The only time they would go offline is if they die or if the owner thinks electricity is too high - in which case he sells them to somebody with cheap electricity (assuming shipping is worth it).

Don't expect difficulty to go down, ever.

But what about 1) electricity cost, if daily bitcoin rewards coming from mining = $21->$20->$19->$18->$17 due to growing difficulty, and electricity is constant $20/day, that's losing money at some point, no matter that the hardware is fully paid for.
2) new miners will stop ordering new hardware, since the price is not catching up and profitability is close to zero after electricity or even negative.

I am not saying everyone will stop mining, but hashrate increased 10x over just 3-4 months, it can't go like that forever unless the price catches up, just laws of economics. It can only grow till it's at least marginally profitable. Just like it did go down in the past, in can go down again, before it can go up again when the price has caught up.

6 months of current level of bitcoin price can make a lot of miners re-think if they should temporarily suspend operations or keep losing money.

Good point actualy.

As it is currently, mining income easily exceeds electricity costs.  See my post above.  When the electricity costs exceed revenue the person will sell the miner to somebody who has cheaper power or will take the miners offline.  But those would be 1st gen ASICs which are becoming increasingly insignificant to the total power.

ASICs were made for Bitcoin.  The only time they stop mining is when Bitcoin dies or the miner dies.

It will never go down unless Bitcoin crashes.

I doubt it will go down but it will definitely slow down in terms of increases as we can see recently no more 25% plus increases FOR NOW

indeed.

Just see alltime diff charts - you can clearly see how this is working .

There is another situation where the difficulty could go down. You se it all the time in altcoins like litecoin. If another SHA256 coin we to be more profitable to mine people would point their miner to that coin reducing BTC difficulty. But I don't se any SHA256 coins even remotely close to BTC. Most alts are script to try and avoid the arms race we se in BTC now. lots of competition in scripts no competition in SHA256.

yes but never...

Good thing it didn't say that.

yes but never will??

It will probably never go down - but it might stuck for a moment and stops growth for a while...

when price will hit 100$ :)

It's unlikely that it will go down soon but no one knows what will happen in far away future

it would not go down. It can stay for a while at it's value. But it will not go down.

Check difficulty charts, and see that it is not :) going down from a loooooooooong time :)

Yes the Difficulty can go down and it has in the past, but it will most likely only be for one or a couple of difficulty changes before it will start rising again.

One possibility would be if for example a very large Bitcoin mining farm would be down for a longer period of time for example if there having technical difficultys or need to relocate to another country or sells the hardware because of electricity cost is making there mining less profitable or unprofitable.

Another possible could be if bitcoin price would make a relatively rapid and big change down in price(ex 10 000 usd/coin down to 2000 usd/coin) and it stayed there for several weeks/months sometime in the future when the "normal" hash-rate increase per difficulty-period is small(1-3%) that could lead to people in large numbers would stop mining or selling/relocating hardware to places/people/country's where electricity price would be lower or in some cases possibly even free.

A third possibility would be that large amount of obsolete mining equipment would end there life as seasonal dependent heating devices replacing/backing up existing electrical heaters witch could then lead to that difficulty could see some decrease in the spring/summer period if the majority of those miners is located on the northern hemisphere.

Last time bitcoin difficulty went down was 23 jan 2013 when the difficulty went down 8,64%

Date              Difficulty     Change    Hash Rate
Feb 05 2013    3,275,465    10.33%    23,447 GH/s
Jan 23 2013    2,968,775    -8.64%    21,251 GH/s
Jan 08 2013    3,249,550     9.06%     23,261 GH/s

You can't be sure of that, it all depends on how quickly the price recovers. If the price rests below profitability level for an extended time, the difficulty could stay about the same or even go down for some time as well. Just common sense and economics 101. In any case, there is no reason to be afraid of the lower difficulty, there is more than enough hash rate on the network, even if some miners drop off, there is still plenty left.

Difficulty will be forced to level off due to technological limitations.

And buying demands

NO and there are miners being developed and used more and more everyday i don't think there is any chance of the difficulty getting low !!!

If difficulty continues to rises at around 20% every 2 weeks, a year from now you will need around 100,000GHs in order to make 1 BTC a month.

Assuming you are using the very latest hardware, 100,000GH/s translates to around 100kW of power.

Assuming you are using a residential service, 100kW of power translates to around 416A.  A modern residential service is typically 200A.

With this in mind, most normal people will be forced to stop mining unless difficulty levels out.


If difficulty continues to rises at around 20% every 2 weeks, by the end of 2015 you will need around 8,000,000GHs in order to make 1 BTC a month.

Assuming you are using the very latest hardware, 8,000,000GH/s translates to around 8,000kW of power.

Assuming you are using a heavy commercial service, 8,000kW of power translates to around 7700A.  The largest heavy commercial service is typically around 6000A.

With this in mind, most data centres will be forced to stop mining unless difficulty levels out.

That is VERY true...the real problem for miners is so called "Power Wall"...very important...if not the most important limitation...than difficulty will stabilize...or could even go down...

This...or next year...we will see...

The main problem with the limitation in your model is that it's centralized... this might just mean that it will no longer be possible for large mining operations to dominate the network so easily and will have more competition from the decentralized part of the network...

People have already invested way to much money into asics to just walk away without a fight :P
I still use my single Antminer U2 xD

Unless people start upgrading the services in their homes to commercial distributed mining is also gonna end.

This question of power availability for mining is a technology problem...if better than 1W/GHs doesn't become available in quantity difficulty will be forced to go down...math does not lie.

And if it does become available the difficulty goes up, right? Math does not lie, but it can be misrepresented to suppoort one's own arguments.

There are currently no hardware predictions for better than 1W/GHs in the next 2 years.

I really hope so as it'll make my Ant Miner ASIC worthwhile again (as I'm getting rid of my GPU now thanks to the scrypt ASICs I got recently.) and I can mine a lot more BTC when difficulty drops (a lot),if it does that is. :)

Now let's see if it will only be for one or two difficulty changes ) My prediction it will be more than two.