You may assume this is the case but there's no guarantee that diff will increase any further and even if it does there's still no guarantee that it will increase consistently for 12-24 months.
If you look at LTC diff chart from Oct 2014 to Oct 2015 when Titans and A2's came on stream, diff increased to 58,000 in Dec 2014, and then fell back to just above 40,000 for 6 months before rising slowly to 58,000 again by the end of 2015
No $ figure, but LTC / BTC dropped from 0.0115 around first of OCT 2014 (continuing a LONG fall from a late 2013 peak) to 0.00612 in mid-May 2015 when the price started to spike and hashrate started climbing again - no doubt due to the return of profitability of older gear and in cases of folks in high electric cost areas return of profitability for ANYTHING at all.
The other thing to keep in mind about the last couple years, is that for much of that timeframe there were NO SHIPMENTS AT ALL of new gear, other than small quantities of the Innosilicon "Farm Boy" units and the fairly small numbers of Alcheminers (and the MAT/etc versions) that were ever shipped. There was no way for hashrate TO increase much with almost no new gear entering the market - and NO new gear at all for almost a year prior to the first shipments of the A4.
Right now, for the first time in about 2 YEARS, we actually have more than one company making Scrypt ASIC - and Bitmain has a long history of shipping every unit of a miner design it CAN 'till it has a "newer, usually more efficient unit" available, unlike Innosilicon which tended to ship hard for a while then taper off.
At this point, I am going to be a bit shocked if difficulty doesn't top 200,000 by the end of the year (vs. the under 100,000 right now) - it might hit a slowdown for a bit when the existing A2/Alcheminer/Titan hordes get unprofitable, but even that won't stop it I am far too certain.
I suspect the current rise won't taper off much 'till the L3 gets fairly close to break-even at 3c/kwh electric, barring a major chip foundry going down again.
Makes me happy my A2s have already hit ROI - and I'm a bit happy the A4 took as long to actually get shipped after it was announced, that extra 4-6 months of high profitable mining mattered!
I do disagree that this is the end of home mining - the L3 is the FIRST "comfortable for a home miner" machine to show up in a while, with the DEBATEABLE exception of the R4. 400 watts and fairly quiet is something ANYONE can fairly easily find a spot for - unlike the other mostly rather loud and MUCH higher power consumption miners of the last 3+ years.
May be so....but at 11c kwh electric winter rates and 14c kwh summer rates....I may get another btc or ltc miner someday (as a toy/spaceheater) but unless we see a MASSIVE
PRICE RISE and/or the ratio of LTC (or other scrypt pow I'm not picky) to above 0.006 say LTC to btc I'm out! Alas!
imho I also think as others have stated on here that
Bitmain will run these miners out in versions of L3,L4.L5 etc like they do their BTC miners...till they hit around a 3c kwh rate or less to make money good for data hall
bitmain runs not so workable for the rest of us......that bitmain can take over much of scrypt mining seems off to a good start data hall and equipment wise ..I mean really 250mh for
400 watts...gonna be tough for others to jump in imho
just the way these things work it seems....anyway I'm likely out of mass miners in a big way...even data halls are 8c to 10c with rent that I've been able to tell....so unless I move to China
out of luck it seems...of any more then 1 or 2 of anything
(eventually)Then again...I at one time drank the Butterfly Labs Koo-Aid thus ...I hope..really hope...I'm dead wrong on any of the above!
At this point, I am going to be a bit shocked if difficulty doesn't top 200,000 by the end of the year (vs. the under 100,000 right now) - it might hit a slowdown for a bit when the existing A2/Alcheminer/Titan hordes get unprofitable, but even that won't stop it I am far too certain
A2/Alcheminers have reached break even at 10c/kw with the last diff spike...you can already see the effect...hashrate peaked at about 2.9 TH and dropped about 300GH since then. I bet you will be sticking around the 100-150k diff for a while as we hover around this equilibrium point of A2 going offline and A4/L3 replacing them.
Keep in mind the current gen hardware only increased efficiency x2...hashrate per machine has stayed around the same.
Hope you are correct as well. But if difficulty hits like 200,000 I'm out for sure...even 150,000 would be tough to justify ..I mean really 44 titan cubes to make 11 original
4 cube titans at 3,200mh (with some dies down)....to make what 300 bucks a month in the basement (summer 5) and rest in data hall in Iowa (6 titans)....the 4 in the
basement would be toast...that's for sure at that point
That would be beyond getting borderline silly imho.
But the HOLY GRAIL is IF say BTC was to hit at a floor of 1,250 to 1,500 usd...and the price ratio of ltc to btc and/or other scrypt would creep up to the equivalent of say
6-7 usd....then the hamster wheels in the Titans could continue and the L3 folk could see an ROI at the end of the tunnel too boot.
(Dare to dream, live the dream, dread the fall)