LITECOIN: what difficulty increase to expect

[katoshi]

hi folks!

i'm thinking about buing mining hardware and try to make profit calculations using http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty

i don't worry much about the exchange rate. if the price for LTC hits rock bottom tomorrow, i can wait for the next boom to refinance the hardware, as long as i make enough coins on the way.

but i fear that using past data and projecting it in the future will underestimate difficulty rise, because of the flood of new miners comming in since bitcoin hit 1000$.

what are your expectations for average difficulty rise (per 2016 blocks/3.5 days) for the next 6 months / year?

best regards,
kato

[farkedup]

Considering how quickly people are setting up rigs since graphics cards are sold out EVERYWHERE you can expect to see a massive difficulty increase to correct things a bit. Recently you could buy a brand new graphics card and it would give you the money back in a WEEK which is just nuts. Right now it's extended to about 3 weeks for the brand new cards which is still completely worth dumping a ton of money into.

[jongameson]

Feathercoin is down like 30 difficulty over the past few days.  Me likey!

This coin is in a position where Bitcoin was back in 2009

[luhao007]

Check this: http://www.coinwarz.com/cryptocurrency/coins/litecoin
In the difficulty chart, you can see how the difficulty changed in last 14 days.
It's increased quite a lot, like 30%.
In my opinion, it will at least tripled the current difficulty with in 6 month.

[katoshi]

thank you all for your feedback.

according to http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/difficulty the last two difficulty increases since the bitcoin boom end of november have been 13-14% per 2016 blocks. projecting that to the future would mean no GPU will ever pay off. see http://bitcoinwisdom.com/litecoin/calculator using 13.5% increase.

however, i expect that the difficulty increase will flatten once the current hype wears off. but since i'm rather new to mining, i lack the experience if, when and how that will happen. any experienced miner around here who can share his experiences with earlier booms?

@jongameson: mining altcoins can help with productivity. right now i'm mining trash coins with low difficulty and try to convert them in BTC and LTC when prices are good. while difficulty is no problem with them, i have to consider exchange rates, which are impossible to predict. no use for mining 1,000,000 DyingCrapCoins fast if the exchange rate drops even faster.