Hmm, maybe.
Care to make a wager?
Perhaps good sir. What are the terms ?
50% difficulty change means exactly 9.3333 between difficulty change (2016 blocks, meant to take 14 days, 14/9.33333 = 1.5)
Ooh ok. 9.3 days then, instead of 14. I'll leave my original post alone, but redo the calculations down here.
Ah ok. So given my premises above (which may not be correct, of course) then we basically have:
N*3
As the theoretical maximum, where N is the number of coins you're mining right now in this difficulty. N becomes 2/3 of its value each difficulty increase, given 50% increases
If difficulty increases every 9.3 days, and adds 50%, then my theoretical maximum # of coins is:
Coinsperday = .33
# Days = 9.33
Coins at current Difficulty = .33 * 9.33 = 3.07 (This is N)
N*3 = 3.07*3 = 9.23
Our theoretical 1.0Ghash miner will get 9.3 for his value of N.
9.3*3 = 27.9 maximum coins over the next 39 difficulty increases (given 50% increases in difficulty)
At $20/coin I make $180 or so.
At $20/coin our theoretical miner makes $558.
By the 6th Difficulty I'll have mined up 8.4 coins, and by the
39th I'll have mined up an additional 0.8 coins.
Provided of course that people do keep hearing about Bitcoins, and that people are willing to continue adding hashing power to the network by a factor of ~2 each 9 days for the next 6 difficulties (45 days).