Bitcoin Forum

Why a bit after the difficulty increase, is our hashing power declining, did a significant amount of miners stop?  if so, and you are one, why?

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin-2k.png

because the difficulty increase made it unprofitable for those miners, so they stopped.

when do you think it will stop(if before next difficulty change)

Given the rise in BTC price, which is a greater percentage hike than the difficulty, that certainly isn't the cause.  

I'm inclined to say it's a portion of the OCN miners that came in as a result of the forum thread there losing interested.  Most the people on those boards are high school / college kids, and came here thinking Bitcoin was a way to make fast easy money with their gaming rigs.  Once the thread got locked, it stopped getting promoted as much and now the surge is dying out.  Just my personal theory for PART of the decline.

i don't think that's the case since bitcoin value also went up for ~40%. I think this is just a temporary drop and it'll be back to full speed shortly.

Warm weather?  Summer electricity rates kick in soon also.

We are getting high enough difficulty to the point where the single gpu miner could have a few problems

1)  Very few coins
2)  Difficulty selling coins (establishing rating, gpg ident, not enough capital for mtgox, etc)
3)  Fan noise is getting old

Don't forget slush's pool going down for a while, and many people may not have noticed right away.

This, regular DDoS attacks, and college ending so kids having to pack up and go home might account for a good bit of this.

I know more than one who has stopped completely or reduced their activity due to heat.  Summer is coming. And I think the high difficulty make many CPU miners give up.  Too hot and enough fan noise for almost no coins.

Yea, i noticed the other day my bedroom was really warm from a warm day here...its colder than it has been in past years, but it was a random, one day.  I stopped my miner that night to try and lower the temp in the apartment, but it was cold the next day.  it just seems sharp for people to switch off from noise though, but heat and difficulty increase probably payed a part in it.. I wonder what mid summer will do to the hash rates


Good point, i noticed that about an hour ago that their hash rate share on bitcoin watch was low..

i don't know if and how the total hash rate is measured.
the only steady measurements are the difficulty and the blocks/hour.
perhaps this is how hashrate is measured, thus it is
not a real but an estimated value. It could be high due to good luck or lower when blocks/hour is lower!

If they got "electric" bill they might have been SHOCKED  :) Hope the Voltage wasn't too high  ;D

Bad joke  ;D

I thought it was hilarious, and I think there's definitely some truth to it.

As the difficulty rises, I expect to see a bigger dip in hash rate (obviously) as single GPU miners and low hash rate miners start to drop out due to ROI.  Only the larger mining operations are going to remain at some point and I think the dip in hash rate is first small indications of that, to a small point.  There are many factors to the dip, I'm sure, but I think part of it is exactly that - it's not as profitable so the smaller miners are dropping out.  I expect that trend to increase dramatically in the near future.

Well I suppose that's not such a bad thing. Us more persistent miner will be there quietly mining and minding our own biz. I found a solution to the coming summer heat problem :) (no, not AC - that would lower profitability) so I'm still going to mine even in the summer. The thing is that sooner or later the difficulty is going to push the majority of "non-professional" miners out of the market and we'll have a hodgepodge of large and dedicated miners doing most of the work.

Why it has never been more profitable to mine.

No kidding. I don't understand these "it's becoming unprofitable to mine" arguments. Couldn't be further from the truth. Before the last difficulty increase, BTC was $4-5. Now we're well upward of $7. The market is adjusting for difficulty increases.

I've been counting on this to happen, but the real A/C bills won't start arriving for a couple of months so it has to be something else.

You mean they might have resistance to the idea of spending so much more money on their electric bill?
If they want to stay current on the bills, they better use their power to lighten the load on their local grid.

Why did it go up in the first place?

If anything is pushing non professional miners out it is heat (and to a lesser extent noise), not profit. Most are using existing hardware, and some have their PC running 24/7 anyway thus the only cost is the difference in power usage between idle and full load.

I think a lot of people don't realize how it adds up over time either...

With the recent difficulty increase, some people who just started mining on their home computers might've been seeing $4 worth or so of BTC come in per day, and just think it's not worth it.  But $4/day is $120/month.  When you're on as tight a budget as I am, then $120 is a LOT of money!

Hey, That's TWO "free" Video games a month. I think that's freaking GREAT for dealing with a little noise and warmth.

Exactly!