jump in stale shares on deepbit?

[heavyb]

For a few days I was earning about 2.5 btc a day and was at .01% with stale shares, over the last two my btc per 24 hrs has dropped to now .98 and have .98% stale shares. I am assuming the huge increase in stale shares is causing the drop in btc, but why such a drastic change?

Thanks.

[Chucksta]

It's not the increase in stale shares that has reduced your BTC per day (at least not by that much), it's the increase in difficulty in mining the BTC. This affects all miners. You aren't alone.

[heavyb]

not that much? 2.5 - .98 is HUGE to me! I am looking to pay off a mining rig! I am getting about 400 mhs. it is ashame it is getting so difficult to mine, it was a fun little hobby!

[heavyb]

if miners abandon mining since the difficulty has raised so much, will the difficulty start to go down since there is not as much competition for the blocks?

[Chucksta]

if miners abandon mining since the difficulty has raised so much, will the difficulty start to go down since there is not as much competition for the blocks?

yes, it would decrease, but a LOT would have to leave.

I've been at this for a couple of months now, but from what I recall there's to be a total of 21 million BTC generated, and that is to take 200 years. I'm not completely certain, but I thought I read that only a certain amount is to be allowed to be generated per week.

If my memory serves me right, and that is so, then that explains the extreme increase in difficulty. With so many people joining this mining operation the difficulty needs to increase and also the number of days between increases also needs to decrease. Otherwise we will have all those 21 million coins generated in quick time.

I might be wrong... my memory isn't very good

[goatpig]

The network evaluates the hashing speed every 2016 blocks. It then adjusts the difficulty to achieve a target of 6 blocks per hour or 2016 blocks completed over the span of 2 weeks (14 days).

Naturally, if the 2016 blocks of a span are computed faster than in 2 weeks, the next span will see its difficulty rise accordingly, and the other way around if it took over 2 weeks to cover the 2016 blocks. There has been 2 occurrences of difficulty reduction so far IIRC. The last one was early-mid April I think.