This difficulty adjustment On 1/22/2017 is historical for the following reason.

[philipma1957]

Hashrate  at the start of this period was

2,411,623,656 GH/s

in a few hours  will we go over

2,800,000,000 GH/s

about 400,000,000 in gear.

about 32,000 s9's

which is 41,600,000 usd in gear

a 400 ph jump has never happened until todays jump.

Adding  41.6 million in gear is impressive not sure if it is a record.

Thoughts on when do we top out and level off.
See below

[franky1]

not that surprising.. it was well announced.
"bitmain new xinjiang farm"

i remember in november/december antpool(bitmain) announcing they were adding a new farm. which would be live by december.
they were at about ~330phash then. now at 500peta.

[rapta]

I think this applies..

https://people.richland.edu/james/lecture/m116/logs/models.html

[calkob]

That is one hell of a bitcoin farm the place looks massive, they must have some serious investment.   

[Velkro]

Hashrate  at the start of this period was

2,411,623,656 GH/s

in a few hours  will we go over

2,800,000,000 GH/s

and thats why my dear amateur miners you are loosing money on mining
because in a matter of hours your earning predictions get cut by around 17%

mining is risky business, remember that

[Gleb Gamow]

not that surprising.. it was well announced.
"bitmain new xinjiang farm"

i remember in november/december antpool(bitmain) announcing they were adding a new farm. which would be live by december.
they were at about ~330phash then. now at 500peta.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=855548.msg9519268#msg9519268 (thread OP)

We are pleased to announce Antpool (antpool.com) which is open for users all around the world. BITMAIN has invested significant resources into developing more efficient bitcoin pool, especially p2pool mining pool. Antpool supports both solo and p2p mining protocol. BITMAIN reaffirms its commitment to help decentralize the Bitcoin network, strengthen the Bitcoin eco-system and put the majority of hashing power into the hands of consumers.

I would've highlighted the important part(s) but Antpool-cum-BITMAIN now disallows that ability for me to do so by having more power than I can muster said action(s).

[philipma1957]

Well between bit mains new farm and the higher price.

A lot of gear fired up.

I know quite a few s7s and Avalon 6s had to be turned on due to prices of coin at 900 plus.

[Lauda]

I've been keeping track of the latest few changes, even though I don't usually do that. Whilst it is way too early to say, it currently shows this:

Estimated Next Difficulty:   449,779,790,167 (+14.46%)

If it remains similar to this, the next jump puts Bitcoin at a difficulty level for a hashrate over 3 Exahash/s.

[deisik]

Hashrate  at the start of this period was

2,411,623,656 GH/s

in a few hours  will we go over

2,800,000,000 GH/s

and thats why my dear amateur miners you are loosing money on mining
because in a matter of hours your earning predictions get cut by around 17%

mining is risky business, remember that

I'm curious if there's anyone who is still mining Bitcoin individually?

I guess most former Bitcoin miners had long ago switched to mining altcoins since Bitcoin mining was heavily monopolized by big mining farms ("Bitcoin mining corporations") as long ago. Also, could the recent price rally have anything to do with the Chinese firing up new farms in last December? They seem to be worth millions of dollars, and the rally came in quite handy to get back some of the funds invested in these complexes

That is one hell of a bitcoin farm the place looks massive, they must have some serious investment.   

Barcelona "mining farm"

[LabaDaba]

Currently 14.17% increase predicted on next adjustment Will be over 3EHash today or tomorrow probably. Have fun miners

[Lauda]

I'm curious if there's anyone who is still mining Bitcoin individually?

I'm certain that there are people running a miner or two, just for the sake of it.

Barcelona "mining farm"

Any source/news link in regards to this farm? Who owns it, how much mining power does it have?

Currently 14.17% increase predicted on next adjustment

I've already posted about that two posts above.

[jaberwock]

some people said that there is a correlation between hash power of the network and the price of Bitcoin, so if the price grows if the hash increases(and increases more if the hash increases more)

also if PBOC wanted to ban or make impossible for the chinese use Bitcoin, the hashrate would not increase at this rise, because most of the hash comes from China and the big farms probably have inside information

[Xester]

not that surprising.. it was well announced.
"bitmain new xinjiang farm"

i remember in november/december antpool(bitmain) announcing they were adding a new farm. which would be live by december.
they were at about ~330phash then. now at 500peta.

I have heard about that new mining farm/data center of bitmain. It was completed last december and according to some sources it was located or placed in Chinas Northern Western Province Xinjiang. In addition the data center can consume 135 megawatts of power and it is seen to be included in the worlds highest powered data centers in the world as this article mentioned https://blog.bitmain.com/en/bitmain-to-set-high-standards-with-state-of-the-art-xinjiang-data-center/.

More power means more hashing power and so the historical data mentioned by the author was due to this. It is good news for bitcoin but bad news for small time bitcoin miners.

[deisik]

I'm curious if there's anyone who is still mining Bitcoin individually?

I'm certain that there are people running a miner or two, just for the sake of it

Hoping to hit a lucky strike?

Barcelona "mining farm"

Any source/news link in regards to this farm? Who owns it, how much mining power does it have?

I don't really know how well 1,017 TFlop translates into hashing power

By "mining farm" in Barcelona I refer to the MareNostrum supercomputer located there. It is housed in an old chapel as you can see on the photo. Though I don't think they are using it to mine bitcoins, but it is quite possible nevertheless that someone had tried just that earlier during their machine time. There were reports of folks using their university mainframes to mine bitcoins in the earlier days (when it still made at least some sense)

some people said that there is a correlation between hash power of the network and the price of Bitcoin, so if the price grows if the hash increases(and increases more if the hash increases more)

Correlation doesn't mean causality

[digaran]

Yes price has a strong link to difficulty, harder to get (mine)BTC means more money spent which that alone builds up the support.
Right now if I could mine with 10 S9_s and find a block in a day all by myself then bitcoin was easy to get by others as well.
But sudden jumps could shock the market as if it's a manipulation but this community is smart enough to detect any fake pump.

[NUFCrichard]

Not to sound too negative here, but it is such a waste of money and energy!
I read through Satoshi's posts in the last week or 2, and he didn't want people racing into GPU mining, because CPU mining is much fairer and everyone can do it.

Now we have these super-farms that cost millions of dollars to set up and run, when they peform the same task as my home PC could do, i.e. confirm the transactions.

The increase is obviously price dependent too, maybe when the price rocketed the miners saw an opportunity to buy new equipment and still make a profit.  They are on razor thin margins otherwise, it isn't a job I would fancy doing!

[European Central Bank]

Not to sound too negative here, but it is such a waste of money and energy!
I read through Satoshi's posts in the last week or 2, and he didn't want people racing into GPU mining, because CPU mining is much fairer and everyone can do it.

yup. it's ludicrous and ultimately damages bitcoin too. i also get the gist that he never foresaw pools either. there's a bunch of stuff that could've done with being tweaked while it was still tiny but you can't account for everything.

[philipma1957]

Not to sound too negative here, but it is such a waste of money and energy!
I read through Satoshi's posts in the last week or 2, and he didn't want people racing into GPU mining, because CPU mining is much fairer and everyone can do it.

Now we have these super-farms that cost millions of dollars to set up and run, when they peform the same task as my home PC could do, i.e. confirm the transactions.

The increase is obviously price dependent too, maybe when the price rocketed the miners saw an opportunity to buy new equipment and still make a profit.  They are on razor thin margins otherwise, it isn't a job I would fancy doing!

Part of the jump is older gear that gets fired up.
The s-7 makes good money if you have 6 cent power.

If btc price dropped to 700 I would think a big drop in hash would happen.