Holy difficulty jump, Batman!

[timk225]

I knew the difficulty would rise, but damn!  86 million to 112 million!  Oh snap, those ASICS that people paid big bucks for are becoming more useless by the day.....  

I'm mining LiteCoin now, but if my 4 Mhash worth of GPUs were pimping BitCoins to the tune of 4 Ghash, it'd take 70 days to get 1 BTC at this difficulty level.  Not.

What do you think the 112 million will become on the next readjustment?  140 million is my guess.

[bythesea]

Depends how it will adjust to the arrival of new miners, but to be hones I don't really see a point in mining with gpu's now when there are so many ASICS out there. Many sold their rigs months ago, same as me.

[wpgdeez]

Yesterday when I was on dotbit.org the last 10 blocks detected were showing at 230 mil! That will suck if the next jump is that huge!

[bitcoiner49er]

Last 4 difficulty increases:
35.89%
29.40%
32.22%
29.56%

Just looks bigger cause we are in triple digits now.

[jeffhuys]

Blocks will always come at roughly the same pace, right?

[os2sam]

Blocks will always come at roughly the same pace, right?

That is the point of difficulty adjustments.

[cbhelp]

Has difficulty ever adjusted down?  And if so, when was the last time it happened

[eleuthria]

Has difficulty ever adjusted down?  And if so, when was the last time it happened

Mid-late 2012 it had some drops when the price was on a continued decline.

[Kluge]

Blocks will always come at roughly the same pace, right?

While hashrate is rising so fast, blocks will confirm increasingly faster (up to ~40-50% faster than target speed) as we come closer to difficulty adjustment. Blocks are only ~5-10% faster than target right after a difficulty adjustment. -So, right now, blocks are confirming relatively slow (though still faster than target time). When hashrate levels off in a few months, I think we'll see a lot of threads asking why Bitcoin just became so slow.