Quote from: TheTick077 on April 17, 2013, 08:25:46 PM

Quote from: kano on April 17, 2013, 10:15:21 AM

In about 6 hours the difficulty will be about 9,000,000
At that difficulty, 10GH/s will make about 0.55 BTC a day.
Use that in your calculations for the next 12 days
... then of course multiply 0.55 by approx 0.84 for the 12 days after that ... and continue doing that until BFL release their hardware
That's a reasonably good estimate ... with the totally unknown number in there "until BFL release"
(coz when that happens the difficulty will sky rocket)

This was posted in another thread, and it got me thinking about difficulty and how often it increases and by how much. Obviously this is an unknown, but from everyone's experience (and I know I am posting in a newbie board, but surely someone has some insight), do those numbers seem legit? Specifically the .16 decrease in BTC mined every 12 days?

Hey there,
Have you already checked out all the chart data at sites like blockchain.info? There's a wealth of data out there that shows the past trends which is quite informative. But since it's very hard to predict the degree of future miner investments and how fast new hardware will come on line, it's a bit of a guessing game (like that original poster suggests by saying "until BFL release"). The new ASIC hardware has got everyone pretty excited/worried as they are expected to make current mining hardware much less profitable once they achieve a degree of penetration.

It's all growing pains of a young network and an exciting time to be alive, and in the end, all I know is that BTC mining is no longer for the feint of heart and needs to be approached like a high risk business. I doubt one would see a 16% drop in mining output in 12 days, but it is still a very bad depreciation curve since difficulty has been growing FAST in step with the explosion of Mhash rates in the last months.