You trolls want to create an excuse for everything instead of facing reality. It's amazing how persistent you all trolls are saying that hashrate increase were gpus instead of asics. Get over it and accept it because asic manufactures already unofficially announced eth asics now you trolls need to face reality and I know how hard is to face that gpu mining might die in 2018 cause you trolls know that if ethash is compromised and so equihash and the denial in this thread shows how much you trolls are trying to hide the fact that asics have been for while mining eth and equihash.
That definitely possible.
BTW I strongly believe that this huge difficulty increase in the last months is due to alt crash.
For quite a while during 2017 ETH was not the best coin to mine, there were plenty of scam coins with much higher profitability.
Right now the market seems to get closer to fair value, so all those dummy projects are slowly going down, making ETH the best coin to mine again.
Basically everyone is mining ETH right now.