Estimated Difficulty is going down

[Grouver (BtcBalance)]

According to bitcoincharts.com the estimated difficulty is less then a weeks ago.
Now the next increase will be around 13%.
And a couple of days ago it was around 14/15 %.

Its clear the difficulty increase is gonna stop rocketing up like before.
This can mean only one thing:

People actually stopped mining.

I am amazed, how about you guys?

[wolftaur]

People actually stopped mining.

I am amazed, how about you guys?

I'm not. I actually personally know three people who got out because Mt.Gox's downtime came at a really bad time for them. They had gotten overexcited -- and then got overextended, spending more on hardware to get into bitcoin than they could really afford. None of the three panicked, but the profit curve for them was such that they couldn't actually stay.

Today, where I live, it went over 100 degrees for the first time this summer. It'll do that many more times. Those rigs in my living room generate a lot of heat. If I actually had to pay extra for my air conditioning those would be a lot less profitable... and I suspect that's slapping a lot of other people as well. I have a local friend trying to talk me into relocating his three mining rigs into my house, because I have better cooling costs -- he's probably going to leave and try to eBay his hardware relatively soon, the cooling costs are going to slap the hell out of him on next month's power bill. That plus the drop after the exchange crisis... he's afraid he'd do worse to stay than he would to leave.

[pjce]

The rate of increase in slowing down, but there's still 13% more processing power in the network compared to the previous update, no?

[Grouver (BtcBalance)]

@pjce
Yes, but the estimated rate is definitely going down compared to a week ago.

[wolftaur]

Yeah, the rate of influx is still exceeding the rate of outbound. Even in my own personal experience ... I know three people leaving, and a fourth who may. I'm about to be adding more hardware, and I know two other people personally who are. And frankly, two of the people leaving, are trying to sell me their hardware, and I may well nab it. But one of them already put his stuff up on a local list, and it might end up with some gamer instead of a miner, and so on. But as summer drags on the cooling needs may push more people out. Difficulty might end up going down at that point.

[gentakin]

I had to put my 290mhash/s ( ) offline for a day and a half because the temperature outside was ~30°C. That surely caused the difficulty to go down a bit.

Now it's back to 16°C outside and my miner is up again. Where I live, air conditioning is only available in modern houses (if at all), and the house where I live was probably built more than 60 years ago. And buying A/C is just too expensive for 290mhash/s, and there's additional power costs, so I'll just turn it off whenever it gets too hot.

[wolftaur]

I had to put my 290mhash/s ( ) offline for a day and a half because the temperature outside was ~30°C. That surely caused the difficulty to go down a bit.

Now it's back to 16°C outside and my miner is up again. Where I live, air conditioning is only available in modern houses (if at all), and the house where I live was probably built more than 60 years ago. And buying A/C is just too expensive for 290mhash/s, and there's additional power costs, so I'll just turn it off whenever it gets too hot.

Yeah, all my neighbors with central air are gonna be complaining like all hell about the power bills... many of them already are. The ones in my neighborhood who are retired or disabled, and are home all day... if they have central air their bills are almost double mine. (And I'm running a ton of hardware besides my GPUs... I'm a geek who never leaves the house.) The building I'm in doesn't have central air... the cooling system is less powerful, and it was uncomfortably warm in some parts of the house today, but where I put the miners, it stayed cool enough that they weren't overheating. And our primary cooling system -- which handles almost the entire house -- draws only 400 watts of power. So my profitability threshold is much, much better than most of the people I know who are mining in homes with central air and the like.