Is difficulty going to rise so fast that

[karmadog]

You would need hundreds of gh/s to even mine 1btc?

[threeip]

If it does, people will panic about their power bill, and the mining pool will shrink leading to less difficulty... apparently 

[MoonShadow]

You already need that.  You can't really mine one bitcoin, you can only mine 25 at a time.  Pool mining permits you to contribute your mining resources to a pot, but you are paid out of the pot's successes and not your own successes really.  But that is a trick of averaging, not the result of real mining effects upon the network.

[threeip]

Deepbit has ~3000gh/s and average a block per 1h20min. Last block got them 25.04855BTC.


So you could say you needed 199gh/s for 1BTC, yes 

[Stephen Gornick]

If it does, people will panic about their power bill,

Depends on whether you are talking GPUs or FPGAs and ASICs.

With ASICs there's a loooonnnnngggg way before the cost of electricity comes back to being a relevant factor as far as profitability (where you'ld consider unplugging).   It was that way with GPUs for a while ( ~ Sept - Jan, 2011), and that will happen again soon thanks to the volume of ASICs now reaching miners.   FPGAs eventually will hit that point but even they are still wildly profitable in terms of generating more revenue than the cost of electricity to power them.  

[threeip]

100% correct Stephen . I guess the lower end of the pool seem to use the most kw per gh and would be more affected by this. They are also more likely to be paying more for power due to residential billing etc.