I think the Bitcoin difficulty will go down around October 10, 2014

[kendog77]

The trend certainly looks like we're in store for the first difficulty decrease since January, 2013.

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

One difficulty adjustment does not a trend make, so don't get crazy and invest in a lot of new mining hardware if the difficulty does go down in the near future. 

[SMB-2525]

Time between blocks is now over 11 minutes here.
https://blockchain.info/stats

Remember that large Chinese operation with 2013 generation ASIC mining. They probably cannot cash flow at $400 and are shutting down (or getting shut down by the power company). Alternatively, they may just be turning off the old miners and waiting for BTC to recover.  We may be seeing the 2013 generation ASICs dropping of the grid.

You may be right.

[generalt]

I certainly hope so, but once the S4's start shipping that's just going to jump right back up.  Despite the fact that the S4 will not ROI they did sell out of batch one.

[philipma1957]

I certainly hope so, but once the S4's start shipping that's just going to jump right back up.  Despite the fact that the S4 will not ROI they did sell out of batch one.

Well the claim is they sold out.  They did not sell that many.  the pay address is floating around I think they sold under 500 of them.

[xstr8guy]

We're way to early in this difficulty period to surmise that difficulty will go down. But I'll go out on a limb and say it's not going down.

And it's not going up because Bitmain (and other consumer miner vendors) will be shipping. It's going up because the large-scale mining operations are still hugely profitable and not shutting down yet. They're adding more miners in stages. We just happen to be in a lull but it's likely to change soon.

[wilth1]

I suspect the profitabilty threshhold for the fab farms is closer to 200USD. They are still banking big and won't even blink building out huge new capacity for at least a couple more months.

[Totscha]

I give it a 50/50 to go down/up. But if there is an increase it will very likely be a small single digit increase...

Similar to what happened on June 29th. Diff went up almost 25% and on the first few days it looked like it will drop. And on July 12th it went up 3%...

It's very likely that some old hardware was disconnected. But new hardware will probably compensate for that in the next week or so...

[PenAndPaper]

I think it's better for them to just stop insta-dumping the new minted coins and wait for the price to recover.
Instead of shutting down their miners that is.

I guess they have some cash left to pay for the power for lets say the next month... 

[taipo]

We just happen to be in a lull but it's likely to change soon.

I agree, I think it could well be a case of being between large scale mining farm startups. Or, a large section of a mass farm could come online tomorrow and blam, up goes the difficulty. Predicting the future at this stage is still a fickle effort.

[fairlay]

By the way: we have an active market on predictions on the difficulty.
https://www.fairlay.com/event/category/bitcoin/difficulty/

We have a prediction running if every difficulty change is at least a increase of 3% this year.
https://www.fairlay.com/predict/registered/new/every-difficulty-increase-in-2014-by-3/
If you click on: [show additional stats] you can see that currently chances are between 53.98% and 50% that it will happen.

If there is interest we can add one wether there will be a decrease this year.

The latest predictions can be found here: https://www.fairlay.com/predict/latest/

[mmeijeri]

Looks as if we had an upward spike in the hashrate today.

[philipma1957]

Looks as if we had an upward spike in the hashrate today.

Yes as the bitmaintech s-4's are starting to arrive in data centers and the like. 

My guess is 3-5% diff jump.
 
time will tell

[ajw7989]

I do not think the difficulty will go down. Based on trends and new miners coming out a lot of the manufacturer's have new machines go on and offline to play with the difficulty. It would not be hard for bitmain to do this. It explains why one day the difficulty is going up 13% then 20% then back to 15%. IT takes some serious hashpower to move the difficulty up a few percent which only manufacturer's or companies have.

[Daengineer]

Its nice to see it go down after watching it spike pretty hard there.

[jonnybravo0311]

I do not think the difficulty will go down. Based on trends and new miners coming out a lot of the manufacturer's have new machines go on and offline to play with the difficulty. It would not be hard for bitmain to do this. It explains why one day the difficulty is going up 13% then 20% then back to 15%. IT takes some serious hashpower to move the difficulty up a few percent which only manufacturer's or companies have.

Let me clarify that a little bit for you.  The bitcoin protocol has no knowledge whatsoever of actual hash rate.  All it knows are the timestamps of found blocks and the current difficulty.  Spikes in hash rate as shown on graphs like those on bitcoinwisdom.com are made up of not only hardware being added and removed from the network, but also statistical variances.  Remember, the entire process of finding a block is nothing more than luck.  You try a random nonce, apply a hash and see if it works.  If it does, congrats.  If not, you try again.  A miner with 1GH/s could potentially solve 5 blocks in 5 seconds, which would produce a perceived spike in the overall network hash rate.

In short, your last sentence should read, "It takes some serious changes in perceived hash rate to move the difficulty up a few percent..."

[cloverme]

It's interesting to see the difficulty slow down and the hashrate level off a bit. I think a lot of the smaller farms are pulling the plug, I know that last week was the first week that I mined at loss in more than 3 years, so others must have taken a hit in the past month. I shut down my asic SHA256 farm in July and contemplating shutting down my scrypt farm this month. If difficulty did drop and the price of BTC started to go up again, I might get back into it, but for now, I think the mining era is nearly over. Too many large farms in China and elsewhere are throwing whatever they have at mining no matter what the cost with investors dollars.

[ChuckBuck]

I don't think the difficulty will go down, since that'll be the time Bitmain and Asicminer will shipping out their new miners.

I think it'll be either sometime next year or early 2016, before we see an actual difficulty decrease.

[xstr8guy]

The prediction that difficulty is going down isn't looking very likely now. 

[Snorek]

I don't think the difficulty will go down, since that'll be the time Bitmain and Asicminer will shipping out their new miners.

I think it'll be either sometime next year or early 2016, before we see an actual difficulty decrease.

Or maybe of decrease it will stay the same for really long time. After latest events I don't believe that it will possible to decrease difficulty of mining btc. Unfortunately, because it would be really nice move.

[generalt]

The prediction that difficulty is going down isn't looking very likely now. 

I heard people are getting their first batch of S4s delivered today.