With the difficultly leveling out... there is a potential.
There isn't. Even if there are no new miners, there will still be newer, better hardware which will push the difficulty up.
As of now there is no way of telling if that new hardware will be released tomorrow, a month, 3 years from now.
First time in 22 months the difficulty went negative.
Althought it would seem it might be soon as people are claming .2Ghs/Watt chips are hitting the market.
New miners based on AM's new chip are due in February:
The schedule of BE300 producing: First batch production will be done next Feb.
We are glad to announce ASICMiner's 4th generation chip. From the physical testing data
of our verification sample, BE300S, the silicon results matches the simulation results faithfully,
and even outperforms our simulation in some cases. BE300S achieved the lowest energy
consumption per gigahash in existing market, getting the joule/gh ratio down below 0.2.
Furthermore, our string-based power solution eliminates almost all power losses and almost
all electric components on the board. Therefore on-wall power consumption would be very close
to (on-chip power/PSU efficiency), and the overall system cost is squeezed to its minimum.
Name: BE300S (Sample)
Technology: TSMC 28nm HPC
Package: FCLGA 5mm x 5mm
On chip efficiency (first board):
3.0GH/s | 0.1872W/G
4.8GH/s | 0.2275W/G
5.2GH/s | 0.2469W/G
On board efficiency (average of 4 boards):
2.8GH/s | 0.1961W/G
3.2GH/s | 0.2026W/G
3.6GH/s | 0.2095W/G
4.0GH/s | 0.2145W/G
4.8GH/s | 0.2204W/G
5.2GH/s | 0.2257W/G
5.6GH/s | 0.2314W/G
6.4GH/s | 0.2363W/G
6.8GH/s | 0.2439W/G
7.2GH/s | 0.2495W/G
We are still testing more voltage-frequency combinations, as well as more chips.
But the test results are stable and solid so far.