Once it gets to this new number, how often would it increase from there?
My guess ... it will grow pretty close to around however much ASICs are purchased from each day's mining proceeds. Using this calculation:
- 25 BTC/Block X 144 Blocks/Day X Current BTC/USD at the time.
So if there is a BTC/USD of $15, that means about $50K USD goes to miners. So if 1 Thash/s costs $30K, then expect mining to increase over the long run at about 1.67 Thash/s per day.
That's an interesting way of looking at it, and I suppose it does make sense.
The way I thought about it was sort of like this: if, say, after 6 months the hash rate hit 150TH/s difficulty would be around 20,000,000 (+/- 2M). Even if another 1,000 people bought Jalapenos, the rate would only go up to 153.5...resulting in a miniscual 2.33% increase. We're seeing jumps of around, what, 7%+ every difficulty change? That would mean a 10.5TH/s increase from the 150...so either 10 people bought TH/s rigs (which seems likely), 263 bought singles, or 3000 bought Jalapenos..or some mix of those numbers. Either way, it'll require more people to invest in ASICs to make the difficulty move higher than it does now (for obvious reasons). It won't ever plateau out, just increase at rates vastly less than what we're used to seeing instead.
