no difficulty increase?

[Desolator]

I don't claim to have the bitcoin protocol memorized but isn't the difficulty reassessment and adjustment on a static time duration?  According to the charts on http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ we're overdue by quite a few days.  How is this possible?

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[FreeMoney]

I don't claim to have the bitcoin protocol memorized but isn't the difficulty reassessment and adjustment on a static time duration?  According to the charts on http://bitcoin.sipa.be/ we're overdue by quite a few days.  How is this possible?

No, it is every 2016 blocks which takes 2 weeks on average.

[the joint]

^^Yep.

Imagine if everybody stopped mining immediately except for some dude with a single NVIDIA card hashing away.

It would take ages for the difficulty to readjust.

[Desolator]

oh yeah, that makes a lot more sense.  But then it makes even less sense.  It makes about as much sense as those last two sentences :-P  Let me explain.  For this last period of 2016 blocks, the mining speed appears to have been overall more above the line than below it.  So that means 2016 blocks should have gotten done faster.  And yet on the 2nd graph on their page, it's obvious that it's been a few extra days compared the last 30 or so difficulty adjustments but that "above the baseline" increase is massive.  How can that be?

[the joint]

oh yeah, that makes a lot more sense.  But then it makes even less sense.  It makes about as much sense as those last two sentences :-P  Let me explain.  For this last period of 2016 blocks, the mining speed appears to have been overall more above the line than below it.  So that means 2016 blocks should have gotten done faster.  And yet on the 2nd graph on their page, it's obvious that it's been a few extra days compared the last 30 or so difficulty adjustments but that "above the baseline" increase is massive.  How can that be?

Well, according to allchains.com and bitcoinwatch.com, we still have 188 blocks left before the next difficulty adjustment.

I don't think it's been 2 weeks yet since the last difficulty adjustment...

[DeathAndTaxes]

oh yeah, that makes a lot more sense.  But then it makes even less sense.  It makes about as much sense as those last two sentences :-P  Let me explain.  For this last period of 2016 blocks, the mining speed appears to have been overall more above the line than below it.  So that means 2016 blocks should have gotten done faster.  And yet on the 2nd graph on their page, it's obvious that it's been a few extra days compared the last 30 or so difficulty adjustments but that "above the baseline" increase is massive.  How can that be?

Which is why difficulty is projected to INCREASE 9% however it won't happen until block 169344 which is projected to be on 03/02/2012.

http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Difficulty only adjusts every 2016 blocks.  Hashrate could double the block after a difficulty adjustment BUT the next adjustment won't occur for 2016 blocks. 

[FreeMoney]

I can't see what on those charts makes it look like an adjustment is overdue.

[the joint]

I can't see what on those charts makes it look like an adjustment is overdue.

Here's what I think happened:  The difficulty adjustment was so minimal this last time around that the graph doesn't distinguish it.  I know what he's referring to -- on the month-to-month chart there's a red difficulty line that seems to range from the beginning of February to the present.  During that time, there was a small ~1% difficulty adjustment, but you don't notice it on the graph and it's represented as a straight line.

[Desolator]

oh yeah, that makes a lot more sense.  But then it makes even less sense.  It makes about as much sense as those last two sentences :-P  Let me explain.  For this last period of 2016 blocks, the mining speed appears to have been overall more above the line than below it.  So that means 2016 blocks should have gotten done faster.  And yet on the 2nd graph on their page, it's obvious that it's been a few extra days compared the last 30 or so difficulty adjustments but that "above the baseline" increase is massive.  How can that be?

Which is why difficulty is projected to INCREASE 9% however it won't happen until block 169344 which is projected to be on 03/02/2012.

http://dot-bit.org/tools/nextDifficulty.php

Difficulty only adjusts every 2016 blocks.  Hashrate could double the block after a difficulty adjustment BUT the next adjustment won't occur for 2016 blocks. 

If the hashrate doubles, the 2016 blocks get found twice as quickly at an average rate of 5 minutes per block so the difficulty adjustment comes twice as soon.  So since the hashrate has been higher than the difficulty line for the majority of this set of 2016, the adjustment should come soon than others.  Which leads me to the next answer for the above post which is, the current difficulty (as rendered) is 39 pixels long thus far.  The last 2016 was 18 pixels.  The two before that were 19 pixels.  Even one of the periods on a massive downward slope was only 23 pixels long.  So 39 pixels is a long time!  We're almost double overdue actually.

EDIT: oh, except that's not a straight line if you zoom up to full res, lol.  Okay, not as inaccurate as I thought.  It's just a downsampling problem in the mini-graph.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Yeah the joint just figured out the source of your confusion one post up.

You can see from the link I gave you the last adjustment was
Block #167328   @18/02/2012 11:24    to difficulty of 1'376'571.08 and as I recall we were happy because it was basically unchanged.

So since last adjustment was 167328 next one will be 167328 + 2016 = 169344

[freshzive]

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

difficulty definitely went up,    1496979 currently

[DeathAndTaxes]

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

difficulty definitely went up,    1496979 currently

and price went down.  Yuck.

[Buckwheet]

http://bitcoin.sipa.be/

difficulty definitely went up,    1496979 currently

and price went down.  Yuck.

This is not related to the difficulty right? Its related to people shorting the coins due to the recent hacktivity right?

[neo_rage]

today increased.