Difficulty only jumped 11.39% today... 1st time under 15% since June 2013

[cloverme]

That was a mild jump in difficulty today and a welcome one if you ask me. 

The constant rise of the 20%ish difficulty increases have been less than welcome. You would think that with the network hashing rate jumping up in petahashes that we would have seen a larger jump today. 

Next jump in ~12 days 

[wpgdeez]

The calm before the storm

[irrational]

The calm before the storm

Let's do this!

[cloverme]

It's nice to have a bit of a break here with the difficulty.  It's too bad the luck has been down over on btcguild though the past few days though.

[tzortz]

Seems like, we will never see 20s' anymore.

Maybe even 15s'.

[leepsteer00]

That's great, isn't it?

[tzortz]

Sure it is.

[Remember remember the 5th of November]

Well the 1TH/s miners are just being shipped, so don't worry we will be back to 20-30%.

[Zimbabwecoin]

This is great news... unfortunately it won't last long. : (

[precrime3]

I'll wait till difficulty increase plateau out, or should I bite the bullet and get 2 antminers? My budget is $1500, and soonest I can gather funds is around 1st week or 2nd week of April. I will eventually be adding another s1, maybe a s2. Should I wait for the right time (which is when?) or buy them ASAP because I am aware all the ASIC preorders are shipping (assuming they do) around end of q/2, beginning of q/3.

[Operatr]

There are some factors at play here:

Explosion in alternate coins-

  We're no longer at a point where all hashpower purchased is going simply to Bitcoin or Litecoin. There are now 100s of coins with their own networks of ASIC miners, dedicated or multi-pooling. From this the    correlation between miners being sold and hashpower curves on any particular network is fundamentally broken as a metric.

Any newer miner or really anyone without hundreds of thousands of dollars at their disposal for Bitcoin only mining is going to be mining alts most likely.

Mining companies missing march/april promises for big miners-

Self explanatory. I was expecting the hashrate to start jumping significantly around now, but is obviously not the case combined with the above point. However:

The thing I am more concerned about here is the deployment of massive scale Bitcoin mines, which could certainly drive some massive difficulty jumps in the future potentially. We will just have to wait and see as always.



Overall mining is still a quickly growing industry, but the power is being diluted among the 100s of alternate networks.

[precrime3]

There needs to be more coins.... More dilution 

[Groc]

The calm before the storm

Exactly

Posted From bitcointalk.org Android App

[Swordsoffreedom]

The calm before the storm

Indeed and it will be quite the storm

[mooncake]

Is the recent low BTC price a factor in the small increase in difficulty?

[skuser]

Is the recent low BTC price a factor in the small increase in difficulty?

I would say not, it seems that it is just difficult to add such a huge amount of hashrate to network. At current hashrate you need to add 4000 1TH/s machines each two weeks to increase difficulty by 10-15% which seems to be not easy with current technologies available.
However I expect 20% jump next time...

[Ekaros]

Real world growth isn't infinite ever... So there might be temporary plateau in near future and then more bumbs from that...