Difficulty = 567358

[Littleshop]

I bet next jump will be to >10^6

I bet 800 - 850k.

I say 700k   Mining is now constrained by the supply of ati cards. 

[urtur]

I'm curious to see how this effects the market.

As for now 1BTC=$19.2 on MtGox 

[Sukrim]

http://mtgoxlive.bco.in/orders <-- difficulty increase, and BAM! 1.2 USD more...

[Meatball]

Well, that is not my assumption! These are rough facts taken from http://blockexplorer.com.

Just noticed that before difficulty increase the network total spped was ~ 5.7 Thash/s and now it is ~ 7.5 Thash/s!!!

What are those machines that do such a huge influx to the network? Or is it again a calculation mistake?

Yeah, I was wondering that too, yesterday the pool was hovering around 4-4.5 TH/sec and this morning it's up to almost 7.6 TH/sec.  On the plus side, all those people freaking out about Deepbit closing in on 50% of the network power at 2 TH/sec can stop worrying...

[finnthecelt]

http://mtgoxlive.bco.in/orders <-- difficulty increase, and BAM! 1.2 USD more...

I wonder if anyone has correlated the price increases yet with the difficulty factor? Surely this will relate in some way....

[mlouca]

I dont mean to sound like a noob, but can someone break down the concept between how much ghash power you need per difficulty level. How do the two bump heads? what is the concept behind the two given we just had an increase in difficulty that means that it is 30% harder to find a block mining at the current speed that you were but how do you justify that? just curious.

[gentakin]

It's simple: The network was designed to produce a new block every 10 minutes.

If miners add a lot of GPUs, then the hashrate goes up and a block is found every 6 minutes instead of every 10 minutes, and this is not wanted. So after 2016 blocks have been found, the network looks back to see if it took the miners 20160 minutes (exactly 14 days) to find these 2016 blocks. If they were too fast, difficulty goes up. If they needed more than 14 days, difficulty goes down.

At least that's how I understand it.

[inh]

Network power is always off after a diff change due to how it is calculated...

Difficulty change + regular Monday suck  is really starting to be a drag :p

[Lightspeed]

It's simple: The network was designed to produce a new block every 10 minutes.

If miners add a lot of GPUs, then the hashrate goes up and a block is found every 6 minutes instead of every 10 minutes, and this is not wanted. So after 2016 blocks have been found, the network looks back to see if it took the miners 20160 minutes (exactly 14 days) to find these 2016 blocks. If they were too fast, difficulty goes up. If they needed more than 14 days, difficulty goes down.

At least that's how I understand it.

but what if bitcoin reaches critical mass and the number of transactions hits 100,000s every block, how big do the blocks get? I've wondered about this aspect of the scalability

[gentakin]

but what if bitcoin reaches critical mass and the number of transactions hits 100,000s every block, how big do the blocks get? I've wondered about this aspect of the scalability

Pretty big. With 100k transactions in a block, it might be 40mb in current block format.

[Horkabork]

I had a lot of difficulty waking up this morning. Do you think it's related to the difficulty change? If so, I'm pretty sure I have some sort of difficulty ESP, especially while I'm sleeping. I'm trying to figure out how to profit from this superpower, but so far all that I've come up with is "Sell difficulty predictions to pools for either a bitcoin or possibly a taco." At the time I came up with that idea, I was hungry for a taco.

Also there was a squirrel in my dream, and I think this is because, the other day, I said that Mt. Gox should have some sort of cute mascot animal, like a squirrel, only it would be bashing its little head against a keyboard. When I pictured the squirrel in my brain it made me laugh, because squirrels are really bad typists. Also it would have lost several of its nuts for being bearish in an obviously bull market.

As you all know, being bearish is just unnatural for a squirrel. Anyway, my ESP is telling me that another difficulty change will happen in less than 2 weeks. I know, it's hard to predict these things, but I've been right about my "less than 2 weeks" guesses for several difficulty changes now.

[Lightspeed]

but what if bitcoin reaches critical mass and the number of transactions hits 100,000s every block, how big do the blocks get? I've wondered about this aspect of the scalability

Pretty big. With 100k transactions in a block, it might be 40mb in current block format.

ultimately we are looking at an internet speed race too yes? lol

[LegitBit]

Price should correlate with difficulty, eventually it will burst, people will drop out and the difficulty will drop back down.

WHen? No clue. It's a fluctuating market, just like the 'real world' market. There will be up's and downs, it just depends on if your heart can take the blows.

[Fuzzy]

It looks like the networks computational power DOUBLED in 24! hours. I hear it is bc Asia has caught wind of BTC.

[Meatball]

God help us all if all those Chinese WoW gold farmers start BTC mining

[Sukrim]

It looks like the networks computational power DOUBLED in 24! hours. I hear it is bc Asia has caught wind of BTC.

Because (like with every difficulty increase) the graphs average over a few blocks/hours/days and thus overshoot at the beginning.

This could be fixed by calculating block-to-block hashrate and after that smoothing things out instead of calculating 100 blocks-to-100 blocks hashrates while assuming the same difficulty for them, but that would be more computationally intense probably.

[HudsonStan]

in 10 days 1 BTC will be 25$  

But then in 20 days 1 BTC will be 0.25$
BTC is overheating now and we don't need to break 20$.

[finnthecelt]

God help us all if all those Chinese WoW gold farmers start BTC mining

I wouldn't put it past the PBC......

[bluefire]

There is a problem with thinking that people will drop out of mining - once the barrier to entry has been passed (purchasing a rig) the only direct cost a miner faces is the cost of electricity and I suppose there needs to be a marginal reward for effort.  If difficulty goes through the roof it will still make sense to continue mining to make the most of a sunk cost (the rig).  I suspect the network computational power will be sticky down - admittedly it may put a damper on growth in the power, but I doubt people will drop out.  Everyone will just have to make he most of the equipment they have bought.

The one saving grace is that in the long run the mechanics are designed to allow for "fair" compensation for the risk of mining - but we talking an ROI of around 10 - 15% p.a. not what people expect at the moment.

[Jack of Diamonds]

in 10 days 1 BTC will be 25$  

But then in 20 days 1 BTC will be 0.25$
BTC is overheating now and we don't need to break 20$.

In 20 days difficulty will be nearing a million.

There is no such thing as "needing" to break a barrier or drop down in price. Supply and demand of bitcoins will dictate a fair price.

The fair price at the moment is around $18 to $19.