Latest posts of: gbx

After playing the hashing game for a while and watching hash power grow exponentially, and difficulty increase..... I have a general question on difficulty. I re-read the original paper and didn't see any limitations on difficulty, but is there a point at which difficulty becomes its most difficult level (i.e. can't increase, programming limitation?) or can it simply continue to increase infinitely?

It just seems that with asics coming on line and hash rates increasing, that its overall a redistribution of bitcoin mining. So the network is really no better off than we were mining with 5770s last year... and the last block to be mined will still be around the same time it was predicted to be mathematically. We've just tipped the same tables in favor of the few who have large amounts of asic hash power.

Or, is there a ceiling limitation to difficulty? And once we hit that, we can mine the block chain faster than originally though possible? There's still a 100 years left of bitcoins to mine...