This series of threads is really great. Thanks to philipma1957 for starting the original discussion. And thanks to Suchmoon for adding the fun factor, and putting up the bounty, of course.
Has anyone thought of setting up a difficulty betting site? I'm thinking that people would pick ranges (you'd have to allow overlap) and actually post BTC to an escrow address. When the winning value is selected, the pot would be divided by the number of winners. Think of the excitement of watching the pot grow down to the wire...
I did a casual Google search, and it looks someone had a similar idea for a difficulty lottery. But when I tried to access it, the site was down.
If someone has already mentioned this idea, then I apologize. Also, if philipma1957 thinks this is off topic, feel free to shut down any resulting discussion.
I am against it only because it takes some fun away.
This thread provides a lot of talk about difficulty plenty of speculation. Plus a chance at a free prize.
In a way it is like the most exotic btc faucet ever done.
No pressure no money out of pocket. (except for suchmoon thanks for that).
If you follow it it is a place or spot for fun and some ideas and info.
Heck it even inspired the speadsheet on google.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qmF2knc5rSrJLESgQJYBz8mPzpKihmSzPPQUGH7pT8g/edit#gid=978410053 jmumich did it This was nice work done for free. Not sure if he will do it again and not quite sure of the slight difference he had for the adjustment. Most likely a time zone issue
But until he did this we I have never seen a 'real' time chart. this was his post on it.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=964922.msg10618341#msg10618341Thanks - I will keep doing it as long as I have the spare time, and add new data as well. I'm pretty confident that the difficulty estimate was off due to the fact that we switched to daylight saving time in the US on Sunday morning, and it was not accounting for the jump from 1:59 a.m. to 3:00 a.m. on Sunday morning. It just assumed that no blocks were solved the entire hour that ordinarily would have been there, and adjusted the estimate downward by about the same amount I ended up being off. I manually corrected for the hour, and it would have predicted 1.54% but for the daylight saving bug, much closer to the 1.59% actual increase.
Remember the estimate is pretty 'dumb' at this point, it only tells you what difficulty would be if all blocks were solved at the same pace as the blocks that were already solved so far this round. Thus, it becomes more accurate as the round moves on.
This link should always go to the current difficulty period:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1qmF2knc5rSrJLESgQJYBz8mPzpKihmSzPPQUGH7pT8gPlease let me know if you have any thoughts or suggestions.