Someone just fired up some serious hashing power.

[MoonShadow]

Dispite the difficulty jump this morning, the average blocks per hour has been rising steadily all day, and now stands at 12 blocks per hour according to bitcoinwatch.com.  Looking at the pie chart, it's definitely in the 'other' section, which has nearly taken half of the pie chart from it's normal position of less than 5%.

[jallen1000]

Holy crap! That does not bode well for us.

[interfect]

Is this from that guy a while back who said he was contracted all exclusively and hush-hush-like to do an FPGA miner for a company that had a bunch of FPGAs left over from Wall Street stuff? Or did *everyone* buy more hardware when the price spiked to $30 and it's all starting to come online?

Miners, status report!

[Xer0]

it's the illuminati, rockefeller and world bank assoiciations! they want back the total control...

[kiwiasian]

Me and a couple of buddies are sharing a 100 GH/s farm for solo mining :/

[goldcd]

Meep.
I have nothing to add - just trying to work out how this'll affect the market.

Considerations:
1) Rate seems to go down at weekends (easier to sell, than buy I guess). Had been intending to sell now and then re-buy when the drop came.
2) Difficulty spike 'should' make coins value go up, I think price/difficulty has always roughly held.
3) Last week has been 'disruptive' - firstly somebody dumping their early coins and slamming the market, and now somebody minting them insanely.
4) Guess this all boils down to whether bitcoins will 'make it' and have 'value' - So far this has been a bubble perpetuated by us. If one person rolls up and takes all the coins, then I'm reasonably sure a fair few of us will drift away. Mr custom-chip (I love conspiracy) will have a shit-load of coins in a market that's losing interest. What will he do - he'll dump them. Personally I think if this happens, it's over.
5) Mt Gox market. Just looking at the spread, there are an awful lot more sellers than buyers. Maybe this is because buyers just rock up and pay what the market is asking, whilst sellers will leave high offers standing - but it's not a healthy supply/demand distribution.
6) What do we do with bitcoins? Putting aside I have a few of them I'd like to sell for untold wealth, really? For a purely anonymous transaction, they're dandy - but this is surely a very rare transaction? Even on SR (which it vanishing can't help the price of BC) it can only protect the seller - whilst giving no protection to the buyer. At least if one were to mail off cash you'd have a clue where to go if ripped off.

[AngelusWebDesign]

What a bunch of n00bs.

Seriously, though...

You have to ignore those figures for at least 24 hours after a reset. It's an easy mistake to make, I'll admit. I wondered what the heck was going on the first time I saw it -- but I assumed something was messed up.

[TheMoneyStorm]

They'll level out over the next 24-36 hrs, Relax people

[anodyne]

The stats are, as mentioned, off the mark after retarget. Probably because they are a mix of realtime data pulled from pool APIs combined with an estimate based on blocks generated over time – which is why "other" always seems to wait to power up a few thousand GPUs until right after the difficulty has gone up.

[Freakin]

The network data are incorrect following a difficulty jump.  It will take 24-48 hours to report accurate information.

[goldcd]

They'll level out over the next 24-36 hrs, Relax people

Bah - I like excitement.
I have no idea what I'm doing, but that almost adds to the fun.
CPU mined BC bought my rig - but difficulty rampings really take the fun out of it.
My 6990 would give me 2.5BC a day, so I bought another one. Day it arrived the pair just served up 2.3. Deepbit is seemingly telling me I'll now just get 1.3 a day... Yes, yes I can break even still, but *wavy-hands*  

[MoonShadow]

Meep.
I have nothing to add - just trying to work out how this'll affect the market.

Considerations:
1) Rate seems to go down at weekends (easier to sell, than buy I guess). Had been intending to sell now and then re-buy when the drop came.
2) Difficulty spike 'should' make coins value go up, I think price/difficulty has always roughly held.
3) Last week has been 'disruptive' - firstly somebody dumping their early coins and slamming the market, and now somebody minting them insanely.

This suggests that some well heeled personalities are stress testing the system.

4) Guess this all boils down to whether bitcoins will 'make it' and have 'value' - So far this has been a bubble perpetuated by us. If one person rolls up and takes all the coins, then I'm reasonably sure a fair few of us will drift away. Mr custom-chip (I love conspiracy) will have a shit-load of coins in a market that's losing interest. What will he do - he'll dump them. Personally I think if this happens, it's over.
5) Mt Gox market. Just looking at the spread, there are an awful lot more sellers than buyers. Maybe this is because buyers just rock up and pay what the market is asking, whilst sellers will leave high offers standing - but it's not a healthy supply/demand distribution.

I'll give you $10 for each of your's and then you can go take your Zoloft.

6) What do we do with bitcoins? Putting aside I have a few of them I'd like to sell for untold wealth, really? For a purely anonymous transaction, they're dandy - but this is surely a very rare transaction? Even on SR (which it vanishing can't help the price of BC) it can only protect the seller - whilst giving no protection to the buyer. At least if one were to mail off cash you'd have a clue where to go if ripped off.

Really?  You suffer from a serious lack of imagination, and seem to be heavily influenced by the BS media reports.  Does anyone really think that the feds have the resources to monitor the outgoing shipments of these vendors?  Do you people watch too much TV?  What do you think happens?  They set a stakeout of the guy's front mailbox?  No, these guys have runners that move the shipments to various dropboxes and post offices.  The cops don't have teh resources to follow them all, so the only reall option that they have is to arrest the runner, but then that tells the vendor that he is being watched, and he suspends business activities.  Nor does the government have the resources to intercept mail in route.  And if they started doing that often, UPS would start complaining openly about the cost burdens.  This kind of mail smuggling has been going on for decades.  The only new addition is Bitcoin.

[anodyne]

There was an address that went up and started mining @45GH on Eligius though: http://eligius.st/~artefact2/eu/1E8jPYas4iJGTrpwfgRgigjRmjGFNqtcuF

It's quite impressive.

[Ruxum]

Even if the stats are off for the difficulty change, it is an interesting topic to discuss.  What are the effects if large farms come online.  From gov't.?  Private companies? Wall street?  hackers?

The effects of each should be discussed for security reasons. 

[freequant]

They'll level out over the next 24-36 hrs, Relax people

I would prefere to believe your soothing words.
But I am sorry to tell you you are wrong.

Look at blockexplorer.
12+ block per hour (for instance block 131117 to 131128 were all found between 2011-06-15 21:00:00 and 22:00:00).
And all these blocks were generated at difficulty 876954

There really is at least twice as much hashing power now than before the difficulty increase, and the network is minting twice as many bitcoins an hours as expected.

Whoever jumped in doesn't mind being noticed.
At any rate, that's a very strange strategy.
Whether you want to take over the block chain to control the currency, or make tons of money by forerunning everybody, you'd better get in progressively if you don't want to frighten everyone and end up with full control over a left over currency.

The only reasons I can see are :
- this new joiner wants to ruin bitcoin, so the fact of being noticed and make people panic is part of the plan.
- this is an agressive IPO from a government or a financial institution who wants to be able to claim ownership of bitcoin at a later stage (hence must have some evidence that it is indeed controlling half of the computationnal power).
- the guy is greedy to the point where he doesn't care being noticed so long as he makes more money.

[Capitan]

What a bunch of n00bs.

Seriously, though...

You have to ignore those figures for at least 24 hours after a reset. It's an easy mistake to make, I'll admit. I wondered what the heck was going on the first time I saw it -- but I assumed something was messed up.

There should be a sticky on the topic of total hashing power, difficulty, and how they are calculated, and how the stats are skewed shortly after difficulty changes.

[befuddled]

The stats are, as mentioned, off the mark after retarget.

Well, at the time of this posting, blockexplorer.com shows 12 blocks in the last hour. Isn't the target rate 6 per hour? My simple mind wants to infer that the hash rate is twice what it was when the difficulty adjustment was computed. Not something that can merely be the artifact of a bad estimation technique, is it?

[carbonc]

Someone at the CIA decided he could throw some hashing power into his/her pocket.  Idle CPU time. heh.

[nebiki]

wow. toss a coin 20 times. you expect 10 heads and 10 tails. but why did you get 15 heads? oh no, the world is coming to an end.

[MoonShadow]

What a bunch of n00bs.

Seriously, though...

You have to ignore those figures for at least 24 hours after a reset. It's an easy mistake to make, I'll admit. I wondered what the heck was going on the first time I saw it -- but I assumed something was messed up.

I'm not a noob, and I checked for a disfunctional statistic.  I'm used to it being off for quite a while after a difficulty adjustment, but as I was watching it, the stats were rising instead of adjusting.  And I still waited for four hours to mention it because I wasn't sure.