Difficulty increase / decrease

[jjiimm_64]

excuse my ignorance,  I have only been at this 2 weeks, still trying to wrap my head around everything.

My question for anyone is,  will the difficulty go down if the blocks per hour stays below 10? 

current from bitcharts
Difficulty   877227
Estimated   1197608 in 1601 blks
Network total   7.982 Thash/s
Blocks/hour   7.36 / 377 s

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[Oldminer]

No, the target is 6

[d.james]

ya at the current rate of 7.5-8 blocks per hour, we'll see another 25%-35%ish growth very soon.

[[Coins!]]

Around 8 days acc'd to block explorere

http://blockexplorer.com/q/eta

[qed]

If i'm not mistaken we got a difficulty decrease only 1 time.

[AngelusWebDesign]

It wasn't since I discovered Bitcoin about a month ago -- and a lot of people discovered it about the same time as me (or later!)

We'll never have times like that again, ever -- not for Bitcoin.

[Chucksta]

It wasn't since I discovered Bitcoin about a month ago -- and a lot of people discovered it about the same time as me (or later!)

We'll never have times like that again, ever -- not for Bitcoin.

Yeah, great times. And just recently with Namecoins... crazy income was had for just over 1 week, then the word got out, and the difficulty went through the roof. All fairly even now on both sides (BTC, NMC), which is okay.... nice steady sensible income.

[molecular]

If i'm not mistaken we got a difficulty decrease only 1 time.

nope, twice

[Hook^]

The difficulty grows in perfect lockstep with the total network computing horsepower.  Check out http://bitcoin.sipa.be/
The red line (difficulty) almost perfectly matches the horsepower growth, which has been averaging 4% a day.  So for any given mining rig, you lose about 4%/day in output for as long as people keep joining the network at that rate.

This is why the online calculators need to take the growth factor into account.  You are competing against something that doubles every two weeks or so.  That is a rough row to hoe.