Quote from: Craftsman32144 on January 16, 2018, 07:39:44 PM

Quote from: MattMell on January 16, 2018, 06:59:09 PM

you are 100% in asking the question and difficulty change play a big part in this. The thing I am taking into consideration - for the difficulty to increase by 10% or 20% per month the network has to add that % hashing power. Now with an estimated 16-17Eh in the network... calculate the number of S9s needed to do that. It will plato imo but continue going up. How much ? Who knows.

edit: also keep in mind that other SHA-256 coins take some of the hashing produced.

That's a fair point. However, I wonder if the hashing power won't grow at that rate or even higher. With all of the ASICs in the market and more powerful and plentiful ones coming, it isn't hard to imagine the network growing exponentially.

Well, that is the question. You think Bitmain+others can produce 20% per month? - ~252 000 miners a month and keep going....(302 000... 363 400.... 435 200... ) ?

As a side-note:
Electrical requirement rough (at 1.3kW/miner) : 327MW...393MW...471MW...565MW.
500MW is about 2.2 million PV Panels.... every month