Date: 2011-Apr-07
Block: 116928
Difficulty: 62185
Date: 2011-Apr-21
Block: 118944
Difficulty: 62366
I'd love it if you were correct, but I suspect the recent difficulty decrease combined with what appears to be a bull market will result in off-lined rigs coming back online. Not sure if 90000 is realistic, either, but I'd be betting on an increase, certainly.
What Difficulty increase?
I don't know - I was talking about the recent
decrease :-)
It went from 76193 down to 68979 in response to a drop in trading price. Trading has been essentially flat, and Difficulty has a very strong tendency to follow price by several weeks (two re-targeting periods). Even if the price went up today, from the evidence we have thus far, I would not expect Difficulty to increase in response to it for another four weeks.
Price has
risen from the mid-70s to the high 80s in the past three days. Whether that will translate to an increase at the next difficulty change I don't know (I'm still betting it will), but I'd be
very surprised if difficulty went from 68979 to 62185. My feeling is that some miners were off-lined when difficulty hit 76193 - it'll take them far less time to come back online than someone purchasing a new mining rig. Just prior to the most recent change, I saw the estimated difficulty increase steadily, from 66000 to 68979. It's too early to get an accurate idea of network power, but I'm guessing it's increased further since the difficulty decrease.
Edit:
...and network power has been increasing fairly steadily since hitting a nadir shortly after the difficulty change to 76193.
