Following on from my stats on the mining difficulty changes I've built a simulation to try to model what would happen if the hashing remained constant for 2 years. Here's one such set of results - they aren't too surprising but it's nice to see them graphically:
There are more thoughts at
http://hashingit.com/17-reach-for-the-ear-defendersThe 18.1% difficulty increase may well just be another example of noise in the difficulty, but equally well the slighly lower numbers for the previous 3 changes may have been noise too
{edit 2014-05-24} I don't mean that the whole 18.1% is noise, but it's quite possible that the real increase in hashing rate was as low as 12.5%. It's also possible it was as high as 24%, but given the trend over the last 4 months it seems more likely that the 18.1% was high, just as the previous 10.66% was probably low.
