Difficulty and hash rate stats over the last 12 months

[davejh]

I've been thinking a lot about difficulty and hash rate statistics for a few weeks now. I just finished going through the last 12 months of statistics and looking at the long-term trend. I was pretty convinced before that looking at the daily hash rate numbers wasn't very interesting but now I'm much more certain.

http://hashingit.com/analysis/29-lies-damned-lies-and-bitcoin-difficulties

There are a few charts in the article, but this one shows the baseline hash rate trend quite nicely:

[1714901786]

1714901786

[BurtW]

Much to my surprise that is a pretty good article.  Nothing personal it is just that so much written about hash rate and difficulty is just garbage.

[nwfella]

I couldn't help but laugh when I came to the part about how miners prefer to view difficulty graphs in logarithmic scale because it "smooths out the spikes".

Totally Guilty!

[davejh]

Much to my surprise that is a pretty good article.  Nothing personal it is just that so much written about hash rate and difficulty is just garbage.

I tried to be as objective about this stuff as I could I'm certainly interested in hearing about any aspects of the statistics that I might have missed though.

I am interested in seeing if there's a way to get better long-term predictions (short term just has way too much statistical noise) but there are even more unknowns once we have to guess average energy costs, average hash costs and what the BTC price will look like. While hash rate growth is currently slowing (and ultimately has to slow more) there's certainly a lot of scope for it to increase substantially if any of those factors were to suddenly change.

[sukamasoto]

If difficulties continue to rise bitcoin mining will require a lot of devices will require power too great

[MelodyRowell]

nm14 asic chip coming out soon, time to sell on market before its too late.

[davejh]

nm14 asic chip coming out soon, time to sell on market before its too late.

They *really* aren't. None of the commercial fabs are ready for that yet. 16 nm is a stretch for early next year.