Difficulty adjustment happens every 2016 blocks. At difficulty adjustment it looks at how fast the blocks were found, not at the hashpower which is unknown to everyone including the bitcoin system itself.

Reward halving happens every 210 000 blocks. It's a separate process from difficulty adjustments. We've had the first reward halving from 50 BTC to 25 BTC per block already.

The goal with difficulty adjustments is that somewhere a block should be mined every 10 minutes on average, not exactly every 10 minutes. If you are lucky you find two blocks in a row in 1 second. And as long as hashpower keeps rising it will be more often than every 10 minutes - that's why the difficulty goes up.

The reward graph at Bitminter shows a single proof of work being worth less and less as the difficulty goes up. That's because the chance to create a block with one proof of work is 1 divided by the current difficulty. As difficulty goes up the work becomes less valuable because it is less likely to actually create a block. Put another way, the average amount of work needed to create a block goes up, so the value of work goes down. At the next reward halving the value of a proof of work will also be halved (if we ignore income from transaction fees).

I have no idea what the world will look like in 20 years.

I know many people are taking mining as an excuse to experiment with water or solar energy and intend to keep their hardware running for as long as it works. The difficultly scales dynamically so while I don't think this has been seen in quite some time it can technically go down if a bunch of miners start being taken offline. Hardware is becoming outdated at an alarming rate but hashing has to continue not only for block discovery and payouts but also to verify transactions. There are some excellent calculators available online that will help you factor in power cost and approx. difficulty increases to guage profitability. I made a small initial investment in some mining hardware and started around 10GH/s. I then jumped to a little over 100 but I've since sold a bit of the gear and right now I have 2 simple Chili miners hashing at around 72GH/s combined. In a few months when they have made me enough coin I might purchase an AntMiner to more than double my hashing power. I'd absolutely love to be one of the big miners with 40TH but I'm approaching this as a hobby and appreciating the decentralized nature of the currency.

I've only been in the game for about 10 months but in that time I've seen the price go from $70 to $1100+ and right back down. If BTC are worth 1 million 20 years from now then even .00001 would probably buy you a coffee somewhere. Right now you can make that off pimping out your signature and faucets.

Luck goes up and down. It's been fairly average lately.

Variance has gone up. That's because the pool is a smaller part of the global hashpower now.

No, you can't improve your average luck by including certain transactions. Take a look at the sha-256 algorithm on wikipedia. See if you can find ways to predict how certain inputs will affect the output. Noone has been able to do it so far.

Pools have different settings for the total size of transactions they will take in a block overall, and how much space is reserved for free transactions. And of course the amount of paid transactions varies over time, both in number and size.

There is no known way (yet) to change the data to make it easier to hash.

You did notice that a little over 1/3 of all work has no 1diff nonces right?

Mostly Cointerra... little bit of KNC and a dash of BFL.


Power usage and heat is off the hook...


 Fox.

I just moved 800gh from btcguild

 4 antminers.

I brought 2.5TH/s yesterday. From Eligius.

Just halfway through the 10 shifts to get the average up to max. I'm at position 31. Hopefully move up soon with more gear.

Not a massive amount but we are proud of ourselves for getting this far.

Jacko

Like I said awhile ago, "You are ahead of me in miners" However I had 300amp circuit warm, occasional blow, when I was doing RC64 17th in the world at that time.
None of that old hardware is usable in mining darnit... quite a setup, I am starting over now.

S1's are really good, any one getting to building enclosures to trap the heat to a exhaust fan outdoors thru the wall ?
Then a 24000 BTU large wall A/C in the room they are in to give em cool air to suck..

I have that setup still, just not suitable hardware... Will get there

Good luck fixing them mate.

I've just setup 3 more Ant S1's pushing mine up to 3040GH/s. Now that is getting a little bit warm. I've rented a secure unit for them with a very high ceiling for the heat to rise up out of the way. I'm just waiting for Virgin to put a fiber broadband in then they are out of the House 

No more shorts and t shirt in winter then LMAO.