Eth diff fell like crazy!

[Bulletdodger]

Hey guys, I just saw eth diff is back to pre-summer days.
Because of the fork or?

https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart

[Tadzka]

Today, with 2 gpus I had ~ 0.4 eth/month estimated, checked 10 minutes earlier, dropped to 0.25 eth/month estimated. Why ? 

[alexrossi]

I think that sudden change like this are directly related with the bizantium fork. Not much public drama but many miners decided to switch for a couple of days to be sure not being hurt by some sudden bug or early exploit, IMHO.

[varusisog]

I think that sudden change like this are directly related with the bizantium fork. Not much public drama but many miners decided to switch for a couple of days to be sure not being hurt by some sudden bug or early exploit, IMHO.

So the profitability is quite high?

[dagarair]

no reward dropped to 3 but time was cut in half so in reality we are about 25-30% faster.  So not bad but not great.

[frostedace]

wonder how that will effect the price, with more coins being minted slightly faster.

[lokinator]

Today, with 2 gpus I had ~ 0.4 eth/month estimated, checked 10 minutes earlier, dropped to 0.25 eth/month estimated. Why ? 

Because people stopped mining ETH temporarily for the fork = less total hash power. Once the fork was verified, people are switching back to mining ETH again = more total hash power. Mining efficiency also improved by about 30% so that will entice a lot of miners who were mining something else, to switch back to ETH.

[jmigdlc99]

ETH difficulty drop is because of the Byzantium upgrade/fork.

Mining profitability returned to where it was last August 2017.
Technical details aside, the number being thrown around by analysts is that the resulting upgrade resulted in a 23% increase in mining profitability for ethereum.

[flip4flop]

Man they couldn’t wait 24 hours till I got my rig up and running to do the fork?  Hopefully difficulty remains low for a little while and the profitablity stays where it is or goes up but I doubt it will as everywhere switches over to take advantage of the post fork difficult but at least good to see.

[Za1n]

Today, with 2 gpus I had ~ 0.4 eth/month estimated, checked 10 minutes earlier, dropped to 0.25 eth/month estimated. Why ? 

Because people stopped mining ETH temporarily for the fork = less total hash power. Once the fork was verified, people are switching back to mining ETH again = more total hash power. Mining efficiency also improved by about 30% so that will entice a lot of miners who were mining something else, to switch back to ETH.

Well they moved to other coins due to the fork or for other reasons, mostly it was chasing whatever was the most profitable coin to mine at the time. Now that Ethereum is the most profitable coin to mine again (at least temporarily) for many it is natural to move back resulting in the hash rate shooting back up and thus the overall profitability go down.

This slight increase in profits is also being reflected in Ethereum's exchange price, where the sudden increase in supply is being dumped almost instantly by some miners, thus suppressing profitability for everyone else even more.

Basically, enjoy the short-term increase in profits while you can because in about 2 weeks your mining profits will be back on track heading for the gutter.

[Metroid]

There is no change in profit, halved the profit, halved the difficulty, move along, there is nothing to be happy or sad about.

[rebelmalangi]

Block reward reduce from 5 Ether to 3 Ether, Lower difficult does not change anything. whattomine shows other coins more profitable.

[Littledragons]

Block reward reduce from 5 Ether to 3 Ether, Lower difficult does not change anything. whattomine shows other coins more profitable.

This is probably true - the issue with whattomine is that it really doesnt account for price swings - it simply does it at a spot in time (ie when you query the server).
So when I query the server if eth diff is low and price is low then eth is definitely not going to be on the top of the list.
Coinwarz is better - but only because it gets proper api calls and shows the differences rather than the spot differences.

Either way, theres no telling how this fork will increase or decrease things. I'm just happy that there are some developments in the works

[adaseb]

Its basically 30% more profitable then before the fork.

[Raimy]

From what I understand the block time was cut in half and the reward was dropped to 3/5th, so the combined result works out to somewhere around 23% profitability increase for miners now versus what it was before the fork.

[xFGND]

It's 100% the Byzantium fork. Everyone expected at least 30% increased profits, it's just that our increased profits aren't as big as expected.

[Salmen]

This happened thanks to the Byzantium fork. There are advantages for the users and disadvantages for the miners. The users who make a transaction through the ETH network pay fewer fees and the network is significantly faster, however, miners are getting paid only 2 Ether instead of 5 Ether. In addition, the difficulty was lowered due to the big difficult to mine a block which caused the big spike in the past months.

[Bulletdodger]

Yeah, I saw it now... Oh well.
I'm leaving my rigs on the usual coins.

[cjclm7]

Strange,

since difficulty level reduced then why we came back to same levels of shares as before?

See blockchain level difficulty reduced: https://etherscan.io/chart/difficulty

Also the calculator: https://etherscan.io/ether-mining-calculator

So what it is going on?

[Sev18]

Thanks to Byz, we got 15~20% profit increase and free from difficult bomb for at least 1 year.