Litecoin Difficultly !?!?

[aso118]

I was just looking at my wallet, and I noticed that my automatic payouts were much further apart then normal.  So I took a look at the current Litecoin difficultly and was very surprised.  I had remembered LTC having a pretty stable difficultly, without a lot of variance.  However, it looks like it has recently tripped.

Date         Difficulty  Change   Hash Rate
Dec 16 2013   3,094    5.74%    88,604 MH/s
Dec 12 2013   2,927    8.60%    83,795 MH/s
Dec 09 2013   2,695   21.44%   77,158 MH/s
Dec 06 2013   2,219   12.93%   63,534 MH/s
Dec 03 2013   1,965   13.30%   56,259 MH/s
Nov 30 2013   1,734   13.89%   49,654 MH/s
Oct 31 2013   1,080   -6.59%   30,934 MH/s
Sep 30 2013   1,064   -9.02%   30,475 MH/s
Sep 01 2013   1,102   17.92%   31,563 MH/s
Jul 25 2013      913     2.10%    26,142 MH/s


Any ideas what the driving factor of this might be?  I know bitcoin (and my proxy, litecoin) has greatly raised in price the month or two, but this is a major increase to the network's mining speed.  This is basically suggesting that the number of GPU miners tripped in the last two months.

Has there been any updates on possible ASICs that are able to mine scrypt-coins?

[1715020075]

1715020075

[1715020075]

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[1715020075]

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[newtothescene]

This is purely around price.  There are no publicly available or widely used ASIC scrypt devices in play.  Before the price went insane, LTC mining was slightly profitable (I have had a few cards hashing for a while) but with the price going up so much there seemed to be a much better ROI which in turn reduced risk.  With the coin price explosion, many people all of a sudden had "extra" funds to spend and why wouldn't they if they could get ROI in 30-45 days time...

Nothing special/secret about this one

[aso118]

Your right.  I didn't think about it from a ROI stand-point.   

Thanks!