2023 Diff thread now opened.

[mikeywith]

It's not just ordinals, it's the BRC-20 ordinals, they made nearly half the transactions on the recent blocks, here are some numbers I managed to pull from here

the order of these 3 numbers is as follows:

- Normal Transactions
- BRC-20
- Non-BRC20 Ordinals


4-5-2023

48.5 %
46 %
5.5 %

3-5-2023

67.5 %
29.9 %
3.7 %

2-5-2023

57 %
41.1 %
0.9 %

1-5-2023

45.4 %
53.7 %
1.0 %

30-4-2023

45.9 %
53.4%
0.7

29-4-2023

54.1%
45.5
0.4


You can see that on some days those BRC20 transactions which are all ordinals and NFTs surpassed the number of normal transactions, and those folks pay a lot in fees, since the start of this BRC20 thing, those transactions created 124.18 BTC.
 
of course, this isn't great for my 14 sat/vbyte transaction that got stuck for days till it cleared out yesterday, but my mining rewards increased pretty well, so I can't complain much.

[1715223267]

1715223267

[philipma1957]

YEAH

788265 -- 1.35
788264 -- 1.28
788263 -- 1.30
788262 -- 1.50
788261 -- 1.38
788260 -- 1.60
788259 -- 1.65
788258 -- 1.48
788257 -- 1.43
788256 -- 1.63


looks very nice to me.

Oh we did a small diff drop - 1.45%

https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator

Latest Block:   788269  (15 minutes ago)

Current Pace:   63.9236%  (14 / 21.90 expected, 7.9 behind)

Previous Difficulty:   48712405953118.43                            
Current Difficulty:   48005534313578.78                            
Next Difficulty:   between 36264184364317 and 47791370291804
Next Difficulty Change:   between -24.4583% and -0.4461%
Previous Retarget:   Today at 10:54 AM  (-1.4511%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   May 18, 2023 at 1:31 PM  (in 13d 22h 58m 27s)
Next Retarget (latest):   May 26, 2023 at 8:32 AM  (in 21d 17h 58m 38s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 14d 2h 37m 28s and 21d 21h 37m 39s
Copy stats to clipboard

I wonder how long big block fees we carry on at 1 btc +
edit edit again  nice streak on the line continues

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc?page=1. edit again streak was bookended by 0.91 at 788436 and 0.91 at 788373 over 60 blocks with fees over 1 btc a truly good streak!

788436--0.91
788435--1.39
788434--1.76
788433--1.06
788432--1.39
788431--1.76
788430--1.03
788429--1.17
788428--1.15
788427--1.21
788426--1.26
788425--1.69
788424--1.48
788423--1.46
788422--1.51
788421--1.46
788420--1.46
788419--1.33
788418--1.40
788417--1.37
788416--1.68
788415--1.82
788414--1.49
788413--1.62
788412--1.63
788411--1.94
788410--1.64
788409--1.68
788408--1.75
788407--1.84
788406--1.89
788405--2.12 top block in the streak
788404--1.50
788403--1.75
788402--1.80
788401--1.65
788400--1.63
788399--1.71
788398--1.70
788397--1.96 >> a really nice one.
788396--1.55
788395--1.57
788394--1.81
788393--1.83
788392--1.66
788391--1.21
788390--1.25
788389--1.43
788388--1.44
788387--1.57
788386--1.56
788385--1.60
788384--1.75
788383--1.30
788382--1.38
788381--1.38
788380--1.41
788379--1.55
788378--1.67
788377--1.48
788376--1.60
788375--1.01
788374--1.05
788373--0.91

[Wind_FURY]

Biggest is only 192629 bytes - only 6 above 180000 bytes, so they must be mostly '1' address transactions, not NFTs

For now, I believe most Ordinals users have been efficient in making their transactions by paying only 1 to 3 SATs per byte, just as how Bitcoin should be if all of the participants in the network are rational.

Plus any theories why mining power has been reaching ATH every month for the year? Many people will say that "the miners follow the price". But I have another theory, "the miners are also speculators". Some miners are probably mining Bitcoin to currently HODL and wait for a better price?

Sure I do it all the time. I am a small commercial farmer maybe 160kwatts.


I mine multiple coins and hodl profits. At current prices the only way I spend BTC is buying new gear to grow the mine. Even though btc price is meh gear prices dropped. So using low priced btc to buy low priced ming gear is good.

If not hold the btc.

 

That's bullish coming from a person who knows the idiosyncrasies of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Plus what do the large mining farm operators know that they would be prepared to invest more money to increase hashing power if it's not another surge for Bitcoin and the super cycle?

If the miners are mining and HODLing more, mere plebs should also start buying and HODLing more.

yeah

new jump soon

https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator

Latest Block:   788253  (23 minutes ago)

Current Pace:   98.4623%  (2014 / 2045.45 expected, 31.45 behind)

Previous Difficulty:   47887764338536.25                            
Current Difficulty:   48712405953118.43                            
Next Difficulty:   between 47976234808667 and 47976235522250
Next Difficulty Change:   between -1.5113% and -1.5113%
Previous Retarget:   April 20, 2023 at 5:52 AM  (+1.7220%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Today at 11:06 AM  (in 0d 0h 20m 18s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Today at 11:06 AM  (in 0d 0h 20m 18s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 14d 5h 14m 50s and 14d 5h 14m 50s
Copy stats to clipboard

Shower-thought, what if there's a sanctioned country that drills/produces a lot of Crude Oil, but it can't export it, or it's forced to export it at a large discount "because sanctions", THEN it discovered the feasibility that it can use its Oil outputs to produce the electricity to mine Bitcoin themselves and sell them at a larger profit vs. if they merely exported it as Oil. Could that actually happen?

 

[philipma1957]

Biggest is only 192629 bytes - only 6 above 180000 bytes, so they must be mostly '1' address transactions, not NFTs

For now, I believe most Ordinals users have been efficient in making their transactions by paying only 1 to 3 SATs per byte, just as how Bitcoin should be if all of the participants in the network are rational.

Plus any theories why mining power has been reaching ATH every month for the year? Many people will say that "the miners follow the price". But I have another theory, "the miners are also speculators". Some miners are probably mining Bitcoin to currently HODL and wait for a better price?

Sure I do it all the time. I am a small commercial farmer maybe 160kwatts.


I mine multiple coins and hodl profits. At current prices the only way I spend BTC is buying new gear to grow the mine. Even though btc price is meh gear prices dropped. So using low priced btc to buy low priced ming gear is good.

If not hold the btc.

 

That's bullish coming from a person who knows the idiosyncrasies of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Plus what do the large mining farm operators know that they would be prepared to invest more money to increase hashing power if it's not another surge for Bitcoin and the super cycle?

If the miners are mining and HODLing more, mere plebs should also start buying and HODLing more.

yeah

new jump soon

https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator

Latest Block:   788253  (23 minutes ago)

Current Pace:   98.4623%  (2014 / 2045.45 expected, 31.45 behind)

Previous Difficulty:   47887764338536.25                            
Current Difficulty:   48712405953118.43                            
Next Difficulty:   between 47976234808667 and 47976235522250
Next Difficulty Change:   between -1.5113% and -1.5113%
Previous Retarget:   April 20, 2023 at 5:52 AM  (+1.7220%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Today at 11:06 AM  (in 0d 0h 20m 18s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Today at 11:06 AM  (in 0d 0h 20m 18s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 14d 5h 14m 50s and 14d 5h 14m 50s
Copy stats to clipboard

Shower-thought, what if there's a sanctioned country that drills/produces a lot of Crude Oil, but it can't export it, or it's forced to export it at a large discount "because sanctions", THEN it discovered the feasibility that it can use its Oil outputs to produce the electricity to mine Bitcoin themselves and sell them at a larger profit vs. if they merely exported it as Oil. Could that actually happen?

 

Not sure, as crude burns shitty needs to become at least diesel. So building a refinery has to cost $$.

https://www.cer-rec.gc.ca/en/data-analysis/energy-markets/market-snapshots/2018/market-snapshot-how-does-refinery-turn-crude-oil-into-products-like-gasoline-diesel.html


https://www.quora.com/Is-it-possible-to-use-crude-oil-in-a-diesel-generator


and maybe this helps
https://www.iqpc.com/media/7791/11215.pdf

[mikeywith]

Shower-thought, what if there's a sanctioned country that drills/produces a lot of Crude Oil, but it can't export it, or it's forced to export it at a large discount "because sanctions", THEN it discovered the feasibility that it can use its Oil outputs to produce the electricity to mine Bitcoin themselves and sell them at a larger profit vs. if they merely exported it as Oil. Could that actually happen?

This has been discussed a couple of times before, an example can be found here, Russia is said to be the second-largest mining hub after U.S, a few issues that would face miners in Russia are

- Corruption.
- Lack of enough infrastructure in some places.
- Heavy reliance on gas for the majority of power consumption (Since most home energy demand is for cooling).
- Uncertainty in the laws in regard to mining.

Probably many more, however, it's likely that the advantages will outweigh the disadvantages, hashrate in Russia is increasing indeed, demand for gears is increasing and I saw a couple of large resellers including some official distributors for large mining manufacturers already built warehouses in Russia to enable Russian miners to buy gears cheaper and faster, which is a new move and suggests that Russians are increasing their mining operations, both on the small scale miners and the large ones.

[philipma1957]

Looks like Russia and India could cut a deal.

oil/crude

[kano]

The BRC-20 txns aren't a lot bigger than a normal txn, not like the Ordinal trash dumping large images into blockchain storage, permanently ... forever.

Waste of space still, but at least not the ridiculous waste of the large ordinal shit that dumped permanently onto everyone's disk storage, for a couple of months back there.

[NotATether]

Looks like Russia and India could cut a deal.

oil/crude

Some foolish part of me wants them to include running Bitcoin mining farms in the deal.

The BRC-20 txns aren't a lot bigger than a normal txn, not like the Ordinal trash dumping large images into blockchain storage, permanently ... forever.

Waste of space still, but at least not the ridiculous waste of the large ordinal shit that dumped permanently onto everyone's disk storage, for a couple of months back there.

It doesn't make much of a difference.

I haven't exactly crunched the numbers yet, but for every Ordinal transaction (let's assume of a compressed JPG) there are now thousands of BRC-20 transactions from bots and members.

I wouldn't say it's much of an improvement in space, because the quantity is being stretched to nullify space gains.

[kano]

Full block bytes sizes are small, so clearly there's a lot of '1' address transactions in each block.

Code:

 Block - Bytes
788528 - 1646310
788529 - 1633454
788530 - 1552075
788531 - 1656294
788532 - 1649494
788533 - 1433263
788534 - 1322646
788535 - 1606969
788536 - 1655834
788537 - 1698426
788538 - 1538266
788539 - 1675019
788540 - 1758185
788541 - 1667429
788542 - 1587856
788543 - 1607003
788544 - 1540421
788545 - 1745459
788546 - 1723692
788547 - 1669045
788548 - 1554346
788549 - 1688098
788550 - 1652143
788551 - 1619409
788552 - 1652063
788553 - 1685618
788554 - 1431885
788555 - 1587737
788556 - 1716743
788557 - 1474761
788558 - 1741520
788559 - 1664175
788560 - 1730796
788561 - 1736698
788562 - 1597304
788563 - 1601204
788564 - 1616029
788565 - 1661053
788566 - 1453640
788567 - 1779870
788568 - 1579740
788569 - 1781879
788570 - 1568529
788571 - 1228671
788572 - 1572057
788573 - 1530665
788574 - 1733424
788575 - 1712448
788576 - 1664394
788577 - 1816195
788578 - 1736421
788579 - 1707677
788580 - 1402233
788581 - 1646718
788582 - 1729331
788583 - 1765077
788584 - 1803412
788585 - 1762786
788586 - 1733132
788587 - 1778321
788588 - 1820271
788589 - 1847842
788590 - 1747256
788591 - 1690519
788592 - 1791670
788593 - 1724562
788594 -     204
788595 - 1801477
788596 - 1430903
788597 - 1673529
788598 - 1820583
788599 - 1769108
788600 - 1804895
788601 - 1521013
788602 - 1647841
788603 - 1812419
788604 - 1855891
788605 - 1779124

[stompix]

Shower-thought, what if there's a sanctioned country that drills/produces a lot of Crude Oil, but it can't export it, or it's forced to export it at a large discount "because sanctions", THEN it discovered the feasibility that it can use its Oil outputs to produce the electricity to mine Bitcoin themselves and sell them at a larger profit vs. if they merely exported it as Oil. Could that actually happen?

Not sure, as crude burns shitty needs to become at least diesel. So building a refinery has to cost $$.

Exactly, oil to electricity is a bad thing, and the conversion just doesn't make sense, you can get around 600kwh from a barrel of oil, forget the energy capacity, that's the actual production of max 15kwh per gallon, so to be competitive in mining at max 10 cents per kWh you would need to sell the barrel at less than 50$. And this is not all the refining, all the gear, the manpower, and everything else. Besides, oil is transportable and far easier than...gas!
So if you think Russia is powering miners with excess electricity that's coming from gas it can't ship anywhere since there are no pipes, not oil!

Back to diff, here I was saying things were boring in mining 
2.34865387BTC fees in the last block, I don't even want to count the average, we've gone above 30% of the reward!!
And despite sky-high fees and income:

Current Pace:   90.1085%  (387 / 429.48 expected, 42.48 behind)

Probably this pace is the last thing some waiting for 10sat/b fees to confirm wanted on this weekend.

[mikeywith]

Current Pace:   90.1085%  (387 / 429.48 expected, 42.48 behind)

Probably this pace is the last thing some waiting for 10sat/b fees to confirm wanted on this weekend.

I have not been following the diff changes much, I am now more interested in watching the block fees, block fees have been above 5BTC for a while now, block 788685 generated 12.38 BTC in rewards, that's insane.

Current fees are 500 sats/Vbyte, you are looking at $20 for an average transaction, I don't recall seeing anything like this for a couple of years now.

37% of today's transactions were non-BRC-20 and non-Ordinals, which also suggests that there are enough "normal" BTC users who are willing to pay a premium to have a transaction stored on the main blockchain which so happens to be the most secure blockchain on planet earth, of course, someone who got used to paying 1 sat/Vbyte won't like what they see, but anyway, I doubt this will last forever, but it's possible that the days of 1 sat/Vbyte are gone, if these NFTs/Ordinals are here to stay, I believe they will set the new minimum to at least 5x or 10x of it used to be before they show up.

[philipma1957]

Current Pace:   90.1085%  (387 / 429.48 expected, 42.48 behind)

Probably this pace is the last thing some waiting for 10sat/b fees to confirm wanted on this weekend.

I have not been following the diff changes much, I am now more interested in watching the block fees, block fees have been above 5BTC for a while now, block 788685 generated 12.38 BTC in rewards, that's insane.

Current fees are 500 sats/Vbyte, you are looking at $20 for an average transaction, I don't recall seeing anything like this for a couple of years now.

37% of today's transactions were non-BRC-20 and non-Ordinals, which also suggests that there are enough "normal" BTC users who are willing to pay a premium to have a transaction stored on the main blockchain which so happens to be the most secure blockchain on planet earth, of course, someone who got used to paying 1 sat/Vbyte won't like what they see, but anyway, I doubt this will last forever, but it's possible that the days of 1 sat/Vbyte are gone, if these NFTs/Ordinals are here to stay, I believe they will set the new minimum to at least 5x or 10x of it used to be before they show up.

It will likely drive btc price down a lot.  But if blocks stay at 9-10btc and price is 22000 miners will do fine.

via btc is paying over 9 cents a th. so the watts per dollar = really good even with price at 27.9k

https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc?page=1

788767 - 6.11
788766 - 6.72
788765 - 5.79
788764 - 6.46
788763 - 7.02
788762 - 6.59
788761 - 6.05
788760 - 6.66
788759 - 3.99
788758 - 2.85


all the way to 788703  which was a zero fee block

64 in a row. average over 4 in fees

amazing exploit.

pay 80% of the tx at 1 sat clog the blockchain losing 0.08 btc
 shut off 100mega watts in your mining gear  losing  more btc

but you drive the fees up to 4 btc

and if you do not pay fees your pool scores tons of btc from other people willing to pay high fees.

[NotFuzzyWarm]

Hmm... Just in...
do a search using "microsoft fusion power" best short version is from Techcrunch and for a more in-depth story about it https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717332/microsoft-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-helion-purchase-agreement

short version: Microsoft has contracted with https://www.helionenergy.com/ for energy from a small fusion plant capable of >50MW to go online in 2028... That power range fits nicely with the mega-mining farms needs...
A quote from Helion's Faq page

Helion’s cost of electricity production is projected to be $0.01 per kWh without assuming any economies of scale from mass production, carbon credits, or government incentives.

The idea behind Helion's design strikes me as quite doable -- and coming from me that is quite a vote of confidence Yes, along with my extensive experience in power systems design, plasma physics has always been part of my skill set as well...   Frankly, their pulsed plasma compression approach is very, well, elegant as is the energy recovery process.

Key question is how much is the net power out of not only the reactor but also true output of the entire power plant to "The Grid" vs power drawn in to create the fusion process aka, net power gain. One thing that helps immensely is that Helion does not use the reaction to heat water to make steam to drive a turbine and so does not have to make up for the losses incurred with each of those steps. They directly recover energy from the plasma via its intense magnetic fields coupling back into the coils that initiated the compression process. Think regenerative braking energy recovery - same (very general) idea but they are not only recovering energy put in but also the additional energy produced by the fusion reaction. So far I have not found info on the actual net conversion ratio...

[philipma1957]

Hmm... Just in...
do a search using "microsoft fusion power" best short version is from Techcrunch and for a more in-depth story about it https://www.theverge.com/2023/5/10/23717332/microsoft-nuclear-fusion-power-plant-helion-purchase-agreement

short version: Microsoft has contracted with https://www.helionenergy.com/ for energy from a small fusion plant capable of >50MW to go online in 2028... That power range fits nicely with the mega-mining farms needs...
A quote from Helion's Faq page

Helion’s cost of electricity production is projected to be $0.01 per kWh without assuming any economies of scale from mass production, carbon credits, or government incentives.

The idea behind Helion's design strikes me as quite doable -- and coming from me that is quite a vote of confidence Yes, along with my extensive experience in power systems design, plasma physics has always been part of my skill set as well...   Frankly, their pulsed plasma compression approach is very, well, elegant as is the energy recovery process.

Key question is how much is the net power out of not only the reactor but also true output of the entire power plant to "The Grid" vs power drawn in to create the fusion process aka, net power gain. One thing that helps immensely is that Helion does not use the reaction to heat water to make steam to drive a turbine and so does not have to make up for the losses incurred with each of those steps. They directly recover energy from the plasma via its intense magnetic fields coupling back into the coils that initiated the compression process. Think regenerative braking energy recovery - same general idea. So far I have not found info on the actual net conversion ratio...

FUSION power mmmm the stars will be ours. Nice.

Wish I was 22 not 66, but maybe the world will be entering something good for a change.

[philipma1957]

https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator


Latest Block:   789704  (a minute ago)

Current Pace:   101.0903%  (1449 / 1433.37 expected, 15.63 ahead)

Previous Difficulty:   48712405953118.43                            
Current Difficulty:   48005534313578.78                            
Next Difficulty:   between 48592207319436 and 48643269679481
Next Difficulty Change:   between +1.2221% and +1.3285%
Previous Retarget:   May 4, 2023 at 10:54 AM  (-1.4511%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Thursday at 7:16 AM  (in 3d 21h 28m 50s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Thursday at 7:34 AM  (in 3d 21h 46m 2s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 20h 22m 33s and 13d 20h 39m 45s
Copy stats to clipboard

back on track for +1 or 2%


also block fees are way down
https://www.blockchain.com/explorer/blocks/btc?page=1

789712--1.09
789711--0.32
789710--0.65
789709--0.38
789708--0.93
789707--0.25
788706--0.32
788705--0.39
788704--0.21
788703--0.26
788702--0.40

viabtc is down to 128% of a block

and 0.00000336 btc a th 

[stompix]

Coming back to this post:

I was curious about this on the last adjustment but forgot about it, so the interesting part about those is that the last time we had 3 consecutive adjustments under 2.5% (+ or -) was on 2022-07-07 , prior to that on 2021-03-19 and 2019-12-19.
So 3 times in 4 years, and not even once we had 4 in a row.

So we're past this:

788,256   2023-05-04 18:28:07   48,005,534,313,578 - 48.01 T   - 1.45 %   0x1705dd01   10 min 10 s   343.07 EH/s
786,240   2023-04-20 12:57:33   48,712,405,953,118 - 48.71 T   + 1.72 %   0x1705c739   09 min 50 s   348.60 EH/s
784,224   2023-04-06 18:33:19   47,887,764,338,536 - 47.89 T   + 2.23 %   0x1705e0b2   09 min 48 s   342.16 EH/s

not even a 1 Exa in a month, (0.91) and we're looking at 2.1% with ~ 3 days to do, high chances to still tick under 2.5%
I will take all the diff adjustments for the last years cause I'm really curious percentage-wise how many times we experience changes this low. Of course, I already know it's one thing to get 10% at 30Exa and a different game for it at 300 but could it is that we reached some sort of peak hashrate moment when expansion plans are on hold?

and 0.00000336 btc a th 

Yeah, I was curious how much we will stay closer to 10 cents rather than 7 but seems like we're back at those levels.
The mempool is still full with 190 blocks of tx left but less than 1/3 of it is over 10sat/b so 0.00000311 now!

[philipma1957]

Coming back to this post:

I was curious about this on the last adjustment but forgot about it, so the interesting part about those is that the last time we had 3 consecutive adjustments under 2.5% (+ or -) was on 2022-07-07 , prior to that on 2021-03-19 and 2019-12-19.
So 3 times in 4 years, and not even once we had 4 in a row.

So we're past this:

788,256   2023-05-04 18:28:07   48,005,534,313,578 - 48.01 T   - 1.45 %   0x1705dd01   10 min 10 s   343.07 EH/s
786,240   2023-04-20 12:57:33   48,712,405,953,118 - 48.71 T   + 1.72 %   0x1705c739   09 min 50 s   348.60 EH/s
784,224   2023-04-06 18:33:19   47,887,764,338,536 - 47.89 T   + 2.23 %   0x1705e0b2   09 min 48 s   342.16 EH/s

not even a 1 Exa in a month, (0.91) and we're looking at 2.1% with ~ 3 days to do, high chances to still tick under 2.5%
I will take all the diff adjustments for the last years cause I'm really curious percentage-wise how many times we experience changes this low. Of course, I already know it's one thing to get 10% at 30Exa and a different game for it at 300 but could it is that we reached some sort of peak hashrate moment when expansion plans are on hold?

and 0.00000336 btc a th 

Yeah, I was curious how much we will stay closer to 10 cents rather than 7 but seems like we're back at those levels.
The mempool is still full with 190 blocks of tx left but less than 1/3 of it is over 10sat/b so 0.00000311 now!

Yeah fees are down but still very good.

viabtc is at 119% per block or 7.43btc  per block .

[mikeywith]

not even a 1 Exa in a month, (0.91) and we're looking at 2.1% with ~ 3 days to do, high chances to still tick under 2.5%
I will take all the diff adjustments for the last years cause I'm really curious percentage-wise how many times we experience changes this low. Of course, I already know it's one thing to get 10% at 30Exa and a different game for it at 300 but could it is that we reached some sort of peak hashrate moment when expansion plans are on hold?

I have been saying for months that any large diff spikes are not "physically" doable, let alone sustainable given the current hashrate and the market conditions, and so far it has been holding true.

We started the year with a difficulty of 35.3T, now it's 48T, that's an increase of 35% over the course of about 11 epochs, with an average of roughly 3% per epoch.

Another thing to look at is the yearly change, taking the difficulty of exactly 12 months ago (16-05-2022) which was 31.25T, that's an increase of 53.6% or an average of 2.23%.

You see the second half had a higher average despite being "harder" to achieve, mainly due to the fact that the price has nearly doubled, but even with the price the pace of difficulty isn't keeping up. Things will only get worse or better (depending on what you want to see) as we move closer to the halving, the next halving is less than a year away, and what gear that pays power has an ROI of less than a year accounting for diff increase for the remaining time till the halving? exactly no gear out there.

As someone who sells miners and has close contact with other sellers, I can already see the drop in demand, people now go with the assumption that

1- BTC price will go up due to the halving.
2- gear prices will drop drastically after the halving.

(which isn't always the case)

Now of course, I don't sell those rich corporate who gamble with other people's money and don't care about doing all the math, but I am sure many of them will hold back on buying gears now which should put more stress on the difficulty spikes, people with free power or some other incentives might still buy gears because their formula is different.

having a few random spikes here and there isn't something I would discard completely, but I am talking about the average growth from now till exactly a year later going into the halving will very, very unlikely sustain anything above 2.1- 2.2% per epoch in the best/worst case scenario.

So by April 2024, one could argue that the difficulty level will not go above 70T, in fact, I will be surprised if it goes above 65T.

[philipma1957]

https://www.bitrawr.com/difficulty-estimator

Latest Block:   790084  (14 minutes ago)

Current Pace:   102.0263%  (1829 / 1792.67 expected, 36.33 ahead)

Previous Difficulty:   48712405953118.43                           
Current Difficulty:   48005534313578.78                           
Next Difficulty:   between 49061109429229 and 49070473681315
Next Difficulty Change:   between +2.1989% and +2.2184%
Previous Retarget:   May 4, 2023 at 10:54 AM  (-1.4511%)
Next Retarget (earliest):   Thursday at 4:14 AM  (in 1d 6h 32m 51s)
Next Retarget (latest):   Thursday at 4:17 AM  (in 1d 6h 36m 18s)
Projected Epoch Length:   between 13d 17h 19m 36s and 13d 17h 23m 3s
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187 blocks to go

we could top 49t for an all-time high

[kano]

Heh, less than a day to go and it's at 2.72% (bitrawr guessed wrong as usual)

At the moment that would be 49.3T, but we'll see.