For those who think Difficulty will go down

[AngelusWebDesign]

Network total   8.418 Thash/s
Blocks/hour   8.04 / 448 s

I wish I had kept a record of it (text file, spreadsheet, etc.) but weren't we at 7.5 Thash/s right before the last Difficulty reset?

Where the heck did we get 1 TERAHASH more capacity? That's a lot of 5830's!  (4,000 to be precise -- but I don't think stores have had that many available...)

I thought the the good cards were sold out!
I thought the mania had passed!
I thought it was the run-up to $30 that caused people to rush to NewEgg with open wallets!
I thought only an insane man would add capacity now!

I think most equipment from the $30 day(s) would have long since been delivered and installed by now.

Can it be that people are still adding capacity with BTC at $15.00? And difficulty where it's at today? 

Food for thought...

[bcpokey]

1) Yes people are still adding capacity at $15. Many using 6870s

2) Just because people ordered their stuff at $30 or $25 or even $20 (it was stable for many days) doesn't mean it would have been completed in a timely manner. Tons of n00bs jumped onboard without any idea of what they were doing. Building a new multi GPU machine was probably harder than they expected (dummy plugs? what are those?) and getting it onto the network probably took a while.

3) Sipa puts computation speed as varying more than 2THash/sec over the past day. Probably casuals coming on and off, newbies failing at getting their rigs stable, pools having issues and so on.

4) And of course difficulty won't go down this time around, it always lags at least 1 cycle behind price changes. If it will go down, or stabilize it will happen the difficulty after next. If things stay as terrible as they are now that is.

[lemonginger]

difficulty is much stickier than price. I think you will have to see a prolonged slump in bitcoin prices are an extreme rise in difficulty to see computational power really start falling. Once rigs are online, their main expense is electricity. Unless people are trying to liquidate their cards and machines before a glut hits the market, they are going to keep mining to try to recoup as much costs as possible, even if not profitable.

I don't think difficulty will go down unless BTC drop below $10 and stay there for a few weeks.

[lemonginger]

also keep in mind there were a lot of people mining namecoins that just switched back to btc now that the difficulty exploded.

[tanerlorn]

Network total   8.418 Thash/s
Blocks/hour   8.04 / 448 s

This information is referring to the last however many blocks found. In other words, it is subject to network variance or luck, just like pools are.

If miners are getting lucky and hitting more blocks than they would expect to, then Network total will appear higher. Its not like looking at poclbm and your hashrate is 300,000Khashes, and the Network total is just the sums of all of those on the network.

What I'm saying is, its possible 1 Thash was added, but its much more likely its simply the estimate is off because miners are getting lucky right now. That's why you're seeing network varying by 2 Thash, as opposed to 2 Thash of machines actually coming on or offline, etc. Not that there isn't people coming on or offline, just not as big a factor, I think.

[beeph]

can someone explain the 8.04 / 440s?

I thought the network solved (ideally) 6 blocks an hour which would be 6.00 / 3600s ?

[lemonginger]

it does, that's why we will be moving up in difficulty again soon

[tanerlorn]

can someone explain the 8.04 / 440s?

I thought the network solved (ideally) 6 blocks an hour which would be 6.00 / 3600s ?

8.04 means 8.04 blocks solved per hour is the moving average

440s means it is taking an average of 440 seconds to solve each block at the current difficulty

[Findeton]

Difficulty will go down... if price stays anywhere near 5$.