Re: What is driving the difficulty jump?

If you look at the hashrate numbers, it increased from 2,411,623,656 GH/s on 10th January to 2,812,940,600 GH/s you need a lot of miners to make this jump. Bitmain started to sell its new T9, its possible that one of the bigs farms received a lot of these new miners. Also Bitmain could start mining on its new farm.

Those numbers still look moderate if we compare them with the growth in prices all of a sudden.
This is just the beginning of a new era in mining, we are possibly heading towards a considerable amount of high-quality mining where it will be impossible for an average miner to even think of it.

what kind of prices are you talking about?

I am talking about the mining hardwares' prices which grew up all of a sudden after halving, that's just because the rewards halved and difficulty grew which was radical as expected, but these mining companies are still not providing such higher hashes against the current rewards and that's what I compared here.