When will we see the next decrease in bitcoin difficulty?

[TheJuice]

Are we getting close?!?

[PolarPoint]

I cannot see bitcoin difficulty dropping at all. If it does drop, there is something seriously wrong. Miners will be very happy to see difficulty rise by single digits each time. With ASICs getting ever more powerful, we might even see closer to 20% hike each adjustment.

[taipo]

It can happen. There will be periods between where equilibrium occurs between power costs, miner costs, increased speed etc. But by far the biggest contributor would be politically driven drops in hashrates:
- for example if a government of a substantial sized country was able to come up with a method of blocking bitcoin transactions and actively blocking connections to mining pools, that sort of thing...in the period between that event and the bitcoin community coming up with a means to circumvent that, the difficulty could drop.

[DrG]

We'll have a 1/2ing in 2016.  Any marginal miners will drop out and some may choose that point to exit.  That would probably be the next drop (if any).

[davejh]

Once the rate of growth of the hashing rate slows to 5% every 14 days (about 0.35% per day) we'll almost inevitably see difficulty drops occur because the statistical randomness will be larger than the main trend. We'd also see difficulty increases of 10% in the same period. Difficulty only approximates the hashing rate, it doesn't actually measure it.

The big question is when will the growth rate slow to 5%? This depends on lots of things; the BTC price will have a dramatic impact on it, as will the availability of lower cost ASICs and a move towards lower-cost energy. If things didn't change much then this might be as early as the end of 2014, but there are certainly scenarios where it might not happen until near the end of 2015.

[pjviitas]

I am predicting that limits in hardware technology and difficulty will clash by 2016 for commercial mining operations and by 2015 for residential mining operations.

Miners are simply going to run out of places to plug these things in.

Industrial mining operations might be able to go past 2016 but now we are talking about mining operations that will drawing as much power as a small city.