Ok mathmeticians, figure out the answer to this one.
Let's say you had one of these 500 Ghash miners, and you could time travel back to January 2009, when the difficulty stayed at 1 almost the entire year.
And let's say you put this miner to work, pimping out the hashes like a mutha.
Now here's the math part: since BTC is limited to a 4X difficulty increase with each adjustment, would it be more profitable to:
1. let the thing hash non stop and let the difficulty rise over a few adjustments to its equilibrium point,... OR...
2. once the difficulty rises, shut off the big miner for a few weeks and let difficulty drop back to 1, then turn it on and run it up again?
I think letting it run non stop, even with higher difficulty after the first few adjustments would be more profitable.
Math it out!