+ 10.9 = QuintLeo
What's interesting to consider is the amount of hash that needs to be added to make a 10% from the last adjustment. Using the figure from bitcoinwisdom of 5,072,782 TH at the last change, the network would need to add 507,278 TH for a 10% increase. That's a lot of S9 hardware, or BitFury containers to deploy. You would think the logistics alone would be pretty daunting. My guess is that this is actually stuff that's been purchased as the price was rising and has taken a while to actually made active. Maybe Bitmain has been "sand bagging" for a while.......
Bitmain is always sandbagging as their cost for s-9's is maybe 500 or 400 usd. they could just build and mine until they kill btc. So they don't do that they control the flow of sales and self mining.
Still the spike was 20% which is 77,000 s-9's even if it is ½ that at 10 % it is around 40,000 s-9's
It's not that they're sandbagging.
It's that they can't get as many chips made as they want to, because *ALL* of the foundries that make current-gen chips are flat-out running at capacity - all 4 of them in the entire world - and a HUGE chunk of that capacity is locked into long-term contracts (TSMC by Nvidia and large cell-phone makers other than Samsung, Samsung by it's internal use + NVidia, Global Foundries by AMD and IBM, Intel by it's internal use and it doesn't SELL OUT capacity) which leaves the "small" chip making folks like Bitmain fighting over the scraps.
I'm 100% sure that Bitmain would love to have been able to sell TWICE as many S9/T9/R4 units over their lifetime so far vs what they've been able to do so - and make twice as many for their internal use while they were at it.