Why is Ethereum Mining Difficulty is Lower Now ?

[davemanet]

Is it because Bitmain stopped mining with their miners and started shipping them out?

Or due to the flood in China?

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[Metroid]

Lower? it has never been lowered by any means and we are at peak of 3.5 almost but difficulty has not been increasing like used to cause  profits have been at lowest, profit wise, i have never seen worse than this, when eth was $7, mining used to give $1,50 per card, now eth is around $470 and it gives $0.30 per card, whatthehell, it means bitmain and people used all their money to mine eth and the network has become overloaded with hashrate than money, which means, do not be surprised if eth's price jumps 10 times in few days to compensate for the profit right now x hashrate overload, right now if eth's price jumps 5 times to $2500, it means that miners will return to $1.50 per card, like used to be when eth was $7. The truth is, this is all a huge mess, when will all this be fixed? when eth's price return to a normal mean which is $2500 right now.

https://etherscan.io/chart/difficulty

[edwardceng]

What?
see the link provided by Metroid

since 2015 Diff increased until October 12, 2017, then October 19, 2017 has diff decreased. Now 2018 the highest diff.

[adaseb]

Is it because Bitmain stopped mining with their miners and started shipping them out?

Or due to the flood in China?

We basically hit an ATH of difficulty last week.

Pretty sure that flood in China only affected the SHA256 ASICs which are only used to mine Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. However looking at the hashrate charts, it doesn't look like anything too drastic happened.

The difficulty for ETH will keep increasing since people are getting weeded out of mining ZEC due to the ASICs. Many 1080Ti's are going to switch to ETH in the next coming weeks since ZEC is no longer profitable for those GPUs.

Same reason why the XMR difficulty will keep increasing since many of the older AMD Radeon GPUs are switching from ZEC to XMR since the profits are identical but it uses less electricity.

[realaccountakira]

Lower? it has never been lowered by any means and we are at peak of 3.5 almost but difficulty has not been increasing like used to cause  profits have been at lowest, profit wise, i have never seen worse than this, when eth was $7, mining used to give $1,50 per card, now eth is around $470 and it gives $0.30 per card, whatthehell, it means bitmain and people used all their money to mine eth and the network has become overloaded with hashrate than money, which means, do not be surprised if eth's price jumps 10 times in few days to compensate for the profit right now x hashrate overload, right now if eth's price jumps 5 times to $2500, it means that miners will return to $1.50 per card, like used to be when eth was $7. The truth is, this is all a huge mess, when will all this be fixed? when eth's price return to a normal mean which is $2500 right now.

https://etherscan.io/chart/difficulty

Although you paint a fluffy picture that we all as miners we would want to be in, I highly doubt that Ethereum's price will "jump 10 times in a few days." Not sure if you are being sarcastic or if there is some forecasted reason to expect this kind of increase?

In any case, we all have to accept the fact that difficulty will never go lower, only always higher.

[leowonderful]

Is it because Bitmain stopped mining with their miners and started shipping them out?

Or due to the flood in China?

We basically hit an ATH of difficulty last week.

Pretty sure that flood in China only affected the SHA256 ASICs which are only used to mine Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. However looking at the hashrate charts, it doesn't look like anything too drastic happened.

The difficulty for ETH will keep increasing since people are getting weeded out of mining ZEC due to the ASICs. Many 1080Ti's are going to switch to ETH in the next coming weeks since ZEC is no longer profitable for those GPUs.

Same reason why the XMR difficulty will keep increasing since many of the older AMD Radeon GPUs are switching from ZEC to XMR since the profits are identical but it uses less electricity.

Yep, the damage in Sichuan seems to only be Bitmain SHA ASICs, though I did notice one article about the flooding did show Vega GPUs, but those should have been mining ZEC/XMR. I suspect there may have been E3 ASICs in play as well, but probably not to an extent as big as the S9S and SHA miners, but the damage may have been enough to lower difficulty. I was actually in Chengdu when the flooding happened, and in my area I witnessed some of the heaviest rainfall I've ever seen in my life. Only found out about the flooding damage a day later.

If anything, Bitmain is continuing production of the E3's and difficulty will probably continue to rise on ETH even after shipping out the last batch. They're likely just going to make another batch with similar prices to the last one.

[Za1n]

As the other's have already pointed out the difficulty has never been higher.

The day-to-day variance you may be looking at is normal and unless it would drop significantly, like to pre-February levels, those minor daily fluctuations mean nothing. The end of this month it will only get worse once the ASICs start shipping.

Also don't count on ETHs price to rally anytime soon. This current rise is but a small relief rally in the already several month's long bear trend, prepare to see ETH drop well under $400 again before we see any meaningful long term rise.