Estimated Next Difficulty: 39,391,636,665 (-2.25%)
low price cuts out some small miners!?
maybe but if you have 14 cent power and a 1.2 watt per gh you make about 12 bucks a month on 1th . this knocks lots of people out.
if you have 9 cent power and a 2 watt per gh you make about 1 dollar a month.
So all the s-1's are being terminated.
to run a s-1 at 140gh and 170 watts
you need at least 10 of them and 11 cent power to make about 50 bucks a month. a lot of work for 50 bucks
lets say you have 7 cent power those 10 s-1's make 100 bucks a month.
I have to think all s-1's are going off line. all 2 watt and most 1.2 watt gear.
I also think big companies want to upgrade slowly.
Say antminer sells 1000 s-3's and adds s-5's in a bit not today.
1000 s-3's = 500th and they replace 1000 s-1's that is 200th so the gain for the home miner is 200gh to 500gh. or 300gh x 1000 = 300th
but antminer was mining them so on the front end the net work dropped 500th so -500th and + 300th is a loss of 200th.
This is part of what has happened.