mining as a whole was severely reduced in the last 2+ weeks?

[Desolator]

I was trying to calculate an anticipated 50 -> 25 reward split date in 2012. It was supposed to be precisely 10 minutes but long story short, it isn't.  I tried to calc it given multiple varying time intervals and came up with a shocking conclusion.

It looks like from block explorer, block #140599 (most recent atm) and #140361 (almost 2 days ago) were created 172,425 second apart.  239 blocks were created during that time so it took an average of 721.44 seconds to solve.  That's 12.02 minutes.  Kinda odd. It's taken longer than 10 minutes to solve a block?!?!  Mathematically, doesn't that mean that 20% of mining power stopped since the last difficulty modification?

After that big of a WTF, I had to go back even further.

The time between block #140,599 and block #139,000 which was solved approx 11 days ago on July 31st was 968,843 seconds.  So 1600 block solves during that period means 605.52 seconds per block so 10.092 minutes each.

So I went back WAY farther. The time between block #140,599 and block #13,900 (solved on May 10th 2009) was 71,159,793 seconds during which 126700 blocks were created so 561.64 seconds each or 9.36 minutes.  That sounds more like what I've heard.

So looking at that trend, apparently in the last 2 weeks and maybe even longer, mining has declined apparently.  That is really, really unexpected.  In fact, doesn't that mean that the difficulty rating might actually go down at the next change?  And are some governments blocking it?  Are electricity prices skyrocketing in some places?  Are cards failings?  Are people paying off their cards completely and liquidating their systems?  What's causing this?

[1715613888]

1715613888

[bcpokey]

Hi, my name is variance, pleasant to meet you.

Seriously though, bitcoin block finding varies by quite a lot. But yes, in the past 2 days the price dropped below $6/coin, a huge panic and all kinds of turmoil over some online bitcoin wallet, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of miners closed up shop. This isn't exactly shocking. Read the thread about the next difficulty change being a likely decrease and people excited over it. Bitcoin is having a hard time right now, we'll see what comes of it.

A nice pictograph of the mining situation:

[Raoul Duke]

Mining must decline or bitcoin price must go up! Or else people will spend more in electricity than they gain in value, and that's not good... In fact that's a terrible waste of energy/resources!  

[TiagoTiago]

Isn't it slower to compensate when it was too fast in the past so it averages out at around 10 min exactly?

[Desolator]

Isn't it slower to compensate when it was too fast in the past so it averages out at around 10 min exactly?

Not exactly.  The difficulty doesn't increase the time past 10 minutes, that only happens when people stop mining mid-difficulty.  It basically says there's 10,000 GH/s right now so that means if I want to take about 10 minutes, the difficulty has to be xxxxxxxxxx and then it locks it in for like, I dunno, 1024 blocks or something like that.  So in that time, if mining drops to 9,000 GH/s then it takes everyone longer.  If more miners hop on nonstop, which is what I'd expect right now, then it takes less than 10 minutes.

[Desolator]

Hey, where'd you get that bitchin' graph from?

Anyway, I was wondering what caused that massive drop but was too busy to actually check.  Anyone got the full scoop about this wallet drama that caused all this?

Btw people, if there's some wallet insecurity from a trojan or website hack or exchange failure or basically anything else, don't immediately sell all your damn coins.  That's never a good idea.  Just put them in a wallet file you personally control, close the client, and encrypt your wallet in a 7z or rar archive with a password.  That makes a lot more sense.  Not that I'm complaining, cuz I made a lot of money buying and selling in that dip but THE MORE YOU KNOW, THE MORE YOU GROW! [/Public Service Announcement]

P.S. when the US credit rating went down to AA, people dumped out of the stock market under the assumption that US companies would have a harder time getting loans from foreign sources and thus all US businesses would do worse from that point on.  Then they put their money in T-bills as in US Treasury Bonds...which are funded by the country that just got its credit rating lowered...aka the rating of how likely they are to pay back bonds.  Yeah, massive selloffs are kinda dumb like 90% of the time in any financial anything.

[bcpokey]

Hey, where'd you get that bitchin' graph from?

Anyway, I was wondering what caused that massive drop but was too busy to actually check.  Anyone got the full scoop about this wallet drama that caused all this?

Btw people, if there's some wallet insecurity from a trojan or website hack or exchange failure or basically anything else, don't immediately sell all your damn coins.  That's never a good idea.  Just put them in a wallet file you personally control, close the client, and encrypt your wallet in a 7z or rar archive with a password.  That makes a lot more sense.  Not that I'm complaining, cuz I made a lot of money buying and selling in that dip but THE MORE YOU KNOW, THE MORE YOU GROW! [/Public Service Announcement]

P.S. when the US credit rating went down to AA, people dumped out of the stock market under the assumption that US companies would have a harder time getting loans from foreign sources and thus all US businesses would do worse from that point on.  Then they put their money in T-bills as in US Treasury Bonds...which are funded by the country that just got its credit rating lowered...aka the rating of how likely they are to pay back bonds.  Yeah, massive selloffs are kinda dumb like 90% of the time in any financial anything.

I don't think anyone has the full scoop, lots of rumors going about though. Mybitcoin.com an online wallet for bitcoins, suddenly went offline. Either it was hacked or the owner took flight, no one really knows. People assume that either way the mybitcoin.com wallets got dumped on the market dropping price like crazy. I personally imagine that the US credit dump hurt a lot of speculators and investors, and potentially what seemed like a fun little profit game, bitcoin, seemed suddenly less fun and perhaps a lot of them dumped out as well. As for the rest of it, I dunno, but as with many things the plummeting of price scared off many miners. They're probably be back if and when the price stabilizes and/or increases.

For now though I expect a difficulty decrease and afterwards to either remain there or decrease even more.

oh and the graph comes from http://bitcoin.sipa.be

my favorite tracking site.

[HudsonStan]

In fact that's a terrible waste of energy/resources!  

In fact that's a cost of security and P2P currency system. It's daily cost is 66000 USD. Significant part of it goes to electric power industry.
Last 20 blocks had 46 transactions per block in average. So 1 transaction costs 10 USD!
Yes, it's quite ineffective right now.

[Oldminer]

You sitting over the top of a farm of GPU's hashing away in temps of 100c (remember it is summer in the US atm) + and the value of Bitcoin drops to $6. Out of that you need to cover the costs of electricity and you still want to recover your capital expenses for the hardware you invested in. What are you going to do?

[Desolator]

You sitting over the top of a farm of GPU's hashing away in temps of 100c (remember it is summer in the US atm) + and the value of Bitcoin drops to $6. Out of that you need to cover the costs of electricity and you still want to recover your capital expenses for the hardware you invested in. What are you going to do?

Well, it's not summer in my basement.  Lol I mean it is but...it's not hot 

Well, in that case I'd double down on solar power or perhaps sit on my rig until winter and use it to heat my house.  Dunno how gas heating compares to electric cost-wise but it's probably getting a lot closer to free energy since you'd have spent that money on gas heating.

Or if "you" actually are "me" you'd quickly buy up a lot of bitcoins on the very accurate assumption that the price isn't going to stay that low and then make a lot of money like for example, what I did    Except Tradehill dropped USD bank transfers so I just quickly sold some computer parts for BTC Check my listing in the marketplace if you wanna buy more stuff