You are impatient and posting crap.  I've gotten plenty of PoT payouts from ozcoin. 

Instead of starting a new thread, how about you post in that pool's specific thread and make some attempt to contact the pool operator, there's an IRC link right on their web page.

Ultimately I think there's room for multiple cryptos to serve a solid role in commerce and trade in the future.  Litecoin has the advantage of faster transaction confirms, the PPCoin proof of stake is interesting, but it doesn't take away from the strength of the Bitcoin network due to being the original cryptocurrency.  A lot of alts are junk, but there are some interesting feature sets out there.

If anything though, the growing inability for the average person to acquire bitcoins easily is a good thing for its legitimacy as a currency.  Currency should be difficult to acquire or else it looses value.  If someone magically found a way to mine gold with a CPU tomorrow, the price would plummet.

As long as it doesn't become centralized, I see no reason that requiring a large upfront cost to mine bitcoin is a problem.  Who knows, maybe Intel will start throwing in a few dozen GH worth of Bitcoin ASIC into a future 14nm process CPU design.  Would be almost trivial for them to do and would give their customers a little bit of "free" income while further increasing the security of the network.

Luck doesn't explain the grey line here: http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

That's a 504 block average and a decent jump.  A good amount of hashpower looks to be coming on and off line since the beginning of the month.  A 1 PH jump on a 504 block average is doubtfully due to luck. 

I could be wrong, but to me it looks like a large batch of ASICs being tested or a large number hitting customer's hands.  I don't think the latter has happened recently.

But if you're calculating month over month increases the way I was... not quite since diff is a function of hashrate over the last 2016 blocks, I was taking a 4PH hashrate, increasing it at 30% every two weeks and seeing what the resulting difficulty would be 3 months out, and that gives us around 5 billion.

10 billion diff in march means a roughly 20x increase in network hashing power by then.  I simply don't think there's enough next-gen hardware in the pipeline to support that kind of growth by then, nor will the vast majority of delivery targets be met.

Hey as long as you know that you don't know something, its easy enough to learn.  Read up on how difficulty works.  This site is very helpful in understanding the relationship to network hash rate and difficulty (as well as predicting the level and time of the next difficulty adjustment): http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

Big hashrate jump in the last couple of days.  Is HashFast testing stealing customer profits prior to shipping?

My mistake, my calculation was based on a 2 week block time and 30% *hash rate* increase per 2 week period, not 30% diff increase.  I still don't believe we'll maintain the growth rate that started in august.  I stand by my prediction of 1.5-2 billion by march.  We would have to see a number of mining hardware manufactuers over deliver to get much past that.

Based on delivery estimates vs actual delivery for many of these companies, I think the rollout of the next generation of chips will be slower than many are hoping for.  After this jump to 28nm chips, we'll continue to see the growth rate slow as that's almost caught up to mainstream chip technology.

As I've said in other posts, ASIC chips have effectively gone through 7 years of chip processing advancements in less than a year.  That partially explains the massive increases in hash rate.  There was an ASIC gold rush, but its just about over so we won't be seeing these 30-40% jumps as a regular occurrence for much longer.

Eventually the growth slams up against equipment demand (dropping as projected ROI drops) and limits of current chip technology for efficiency in hashes/s per watt and $(BTC)/hashes/s.   

Even if we have a 30% diff jump every ~two weeks until march, that only puts us at 5 billion difficulty by my calculations.  I still doubt we'll see that continuously for the next ~3 months.

Perfect, so the answer to the original question on user changeable difficulty is obvious and if someone can't figure it out then they shouldn't be trying to adjust their difficulty in the first place

That's why he views it as a lottery... could happen.

I hit a block finding share on my GPU a few months ago before I got into running asics, it can certainly happen   Course I was on a pool, but I just consider it paying back for all those pool earnings in years past before I ever found a block myself.

1.5-2 billion by march, and that's only if a lot of outstanding promises by ASIC companies are kept.

I wouldn't say there's an endgame, hash power should continue to grow until the end of time (or bitcoin).

But, doubling in power every month is a short term trend.  There's many factors that play into overall network hash rate, but ultimately the limit will be on the technology available.  These rapid increases we're seeing are because Bitcoin ASICs are still relatively new and their chip technology is quite a ways behind mainstream microprocessor tech.

As ASIC fab process get closer and closer to currently available general purpose processor tech, that growth rate will slow.

In one year we've gone from 110nm process ASICs (chip tech circa 2004) to possibly 28nm process ASICs (chip tech circa 2011).  That's 7 years of chip technology crammed in under 12 months!  Of course we're going to see huge hash rate increases.

If bitcoin prices continue to rise, we'll probably see ASIC die processes just about caught up to mainstream processors at some point next year (newer processes are quite a bit more expensive than "ancient" ones, so the demand created by BTC price has to be there).  From then on, hash power growth will be a function of what's left of Moore's "law", the number of miners buying new hardware, and BTC prices. 

Heck at 28nm, that's already caught up to AMD's chip technology.  The amount of R&D necessary to efficiently and reliably package high performance chips at smaller and smaller nodes goes up quite a lot.  Intel is only on 22nm for their mass-market processors.

We may never see difficulty jumps over 40% again, and if we do they will be few and far between.  So I guess I agree with the OP in difficulty jumps tapering off and I would go so far as to say the peak may have already happened for a one-month timeframe.

Just buying bitcoins isn't fun though   Mine at a fee-free pool and cut out the middleman anyway!  Heck there's still people CPU mining just because they can.

More miners = stronger network = better long term valuation of existing bitcoins.

Does not compute...

Are you just extending the exponential growth rate of the past month or so out a year?  There's no way its going to continue like that.  Sure there will be high diff jumps down the line, but there's simply not enough silicon being fabbed to continue that growth indefinitely.

I think the more accurate estimates are based on Bitcoin ASIC machines actually in the pipeline no?

Is the 32 share per minute target per-worker or per-address?  Knowing that could help some configurations and allow the miner some flexibility in optimizing their configuration.

Good... good.  Judging by the meeting title they will be focusing on a small and trivial application of the technology.  By the time they fully grasp the implications of of the more profound applications of cryptocurrency, it will be far to late to be able to take any action to prevent its growth (if its not too late already).

2 mistakes.  1 you assume BFL will actually deliver by january/februrary, that's a brave assumption.

Hash rate will continue to rise exponentially, but not as fast as in recent months.  The growth we're seeing is ASIC chips starting to catch up with mainstream chip technology.  Mainstream CPUs have been on the 22nm process since Q2 2012, Bitcoin ASICS aren't even there yet.

Intel is projecting 5nm technology in 2019, Bitcoin ASIC could well be caught up by then.

So we will still see exponential growth, but that growth curve will slow the closer the ASICs get to the limits of current microprocessor technology.

I think we'll continue to see large jumps here and there over the next year, but the growth curve will become a bit more predictable as the hardware manufacturers establish themselves and begin consistent product R&D and delivery cycles.

It doesn't have to destroy them to have a major impact. Just competing with them would be game-changing.  If Bitcoin or an even better iteration of the technology does eventually supplant fiat systems, all the better.

Sublime, you may be trolling, but I'll engage in discussing this train of thought.

I think your underestimating the potential intrinsic value of bitcoin.  You compare them to baseball cards,  yet a baseball card can not be traded nearly instantly with high security anywhere in the world.

Bitcoin's value is that it allows you to accomplish something that previously has required the might if an entire nation to do.  Money only has value because there are laws in place that encourage you to honor it's value.   

The very nature of bitcoin however is that the security of your store of value does not depend on expensive anti-counterfieting technology, millions of highly paid bankers, politicians, and the backing of the largest military in the world. See where I'm going with this?

Really think about all that goes into what allows the fairly common event of being able to hand a complete stranger a piece of cloth-paper with some fancy ink on it and that stranger transfer to you a valuable item such as food, clothing, shelter, transportation, or entertainment. That every day occurrence is possible due to the massive financial and governmental industries.

Now think about how much of that store of value is needed simply to guarantee its own value.  Traditional currencies require a massive middleman, imagine what the world would look like if you could utilize all the benefits of a traditional currency at a fraction of the cost.

Now, will bitcoin ever become the sole currency of the world? No, but the feature sets of of a variety of crypto currencies could eventually replace a significant portion of fiat currency.  You can see around you how many fiat systems are collapsing under thier own weight.

No one could have predicted how the ability to send information nearly instantly and with high security anywhere in the world would change it.  I'm speaking of the Internet of course.

Bitcoin simply adds the ability to guarantee uniqueness and ownership to a piece of information, but as with currency, these attributes are highly valuable.  Who knows how bitcoin may (or may not) change the world?