Difficulty speculations by March 1 2014

[JungleBook]

Difficulty speculations by March 1 2014

Things to take into Account:
-New much stronger ASIC miners will be hitting the network by December
-All the New people excited about Bitcoin will be throwing whatever miners they can get their hands on at the network. Even though it makes no sense.


When would you say we will hit 1,000,000,000 DIFF?

[Zawamiya]

Difficulty speculations by March 1 2014

Things to take into Account:
-New much stronger ASIC miners will be hitting the network by December
-All the New people excited about Bitcoin will be throwing whatever miners they can get their hands on at the network. Even though it makes no sense.


When would you say we will hit 1,000,000,000 DIFF?

Too low, I believe at least 2,000,000,000 DIFF...

[mgio]

Difficulty speculations by March 1 2014

Things to take into Account:
-New much stronger ASIC miners will be hitting the network by December
-All the New people excited about Bitcoin will be throwing whatever miners they can get their hands on at the network. Even though it makes no sense.


When would you say we will hit 1,000,000,000 DIFF?

Too low, I believe at least 2,000,000,000 DIFF...

Right now I have estimate 2.5 billion. It might be as low as 2.0 billion, but could easily be as high as 4 or 5 billion especially if hashfast and cointerra ship.

[mrhelpful]

It depends on how fast these companies like BFL ship out the 500ghz monarchs etc. But, yes it will be in the billions.

Despite the poor reputation.

[Dalkore]

2-3 billion.

[Moebius327]

My guess would be 1.5

Misread the title "January"

So I would say 2,8-3,8

[DrG]

2.5 -3 bil

[BitcoinHeroes]

5 Bil.... cointerra is coming out with 1-2 TH/s......

[ScaryHash]

Pretty soon, all of these ASIC companies are going to go out of business, because nobody in their right mind will pay for overpriced ASICs that will never ROI.

Nothing really wrong with not ROIing, as long as you support the network. But it's not worth paying through the nose for.

[Viperbass]

We will be at around 3.8 billion and that might even end up being conservative, by the end of next year easily over 11 billion.
"Just remember kids it's down the road and not across the street."

[thew3apon]

5 Billion...

[Thenen]

Difficulty speculations by March 1 2014

Things to take into Account:
-New much stronger ASIC miners will be hitting the network by December
-All the New people excited about Bitcoin will be throwing whatever miners they can get their hands on at the network. Even though it makes no sense.


When would you say we will hit 1,000,000,000 DIFF?

I believe it would hit 1Bil end of this year.

[fizzmine]

1.5-2 billion by march, and that's only if a lot of outstanding promises by ASIC companies are kept.

[niothor]

10-20 billion is what I anticipate. Continuous 30% growth.

Just out of pure curiosity and pure laziness to make the calculation myself , even with a 30% increase will it really hit 20bil?

[fizzmine]

Even if we have a 30% diff jump every ~two weeks until march, that only puts us at 5 billion difficulty by my calculations.  I still doubt we'll see that continuously for the next ~3 months.

[TheDragonSlayer]

Even if we have a 30% diff jump every ~two weeks until march, that only puts us at 5 billion difficulty by my calculations.  I still doubt we'll see that continuously for the next ~3 months.

shouldn't be hard to see a 30% diff jump... hashfast is shipping their product next month about 1 PH/s right?

[fizzmine]

My mistake, my calculation was based on a 2 week block time and 30% *hash rate* increase per 2 week period, not 30% diff increase.  I still don't believe we'll maintain the growth rate that started in august.  I stand by my prediction of 1.5-2 billion by march.  We would have to see a number of mining hardware manufactuers over deliver to get much past that.

Based on delivery estimates vs actual delivery for many of these companies, I think the rollout of the next generation of chips will be slower than many are hoping for.  After this jump to 28nm chips, we'll continue to see the growth rate slow as that's almost caught up to mainstream chip technology.

As I've said in other posts, ASIC chips have effectively gone through 7 years of chip processing advancements in less than a year.  That partially explains the massive increases in hash rate.  There was an ASIC gold rush, but its just about over so we won't be seeing these 30-40% jumps as a regular occurrence for much longer.

Eventually the growth slams up against equipment demand (dropping as projected ROI drops) and limits of current chip technology for efficiency in hashes/s per watt and $(BTC)/hashes/s.   

[fizzmine]

30% *hash rate* increase per 2 week period, not 30% diff increase.

These are the same thing, difficulty is linear with hashrate.
1 diff is ~7.7 Mh/s

But if you're calculating month over month increases the way I was... not quite since diff is a function of hashrate over the last 2016 blocks, I was taking a 4PH hashrate, increasing it at 30% every two weeks and seeing what the resulting difficulty would be 3 months out, and that gives us around 5 billion.

10 billion diff in march means a roughly 20x increase in network hashing power by then.  I simply don't think there's enough next-gen hardware in the pipeline to support that kind of growth by then, nor will the vast majority of delivery targets be met.

[cdog]

3.2B

[Sythyn]

The difficulty has slowed down..

Bitcoin Difficulty:   510,929,738
Estimated Next Difficulty:   607,551,779 (+18.91%)
Adjust time:   After 27 Blocks, About 3.5 hours

So for march 2014 should be around 1 billion difficulty