Kidding... I hope?

[1] That only applies if miners are on average mining break even. With all those Chinese miners who are basically mining for free I presume on average miners are mining with a profit. You are right about the remainder. Worst case scenario the hashrate drops so much that you would need a emergency hardfork to adjust the difficulty.

[2] Not entirely true, the hashrate "ramped up" in the summer, but you can see a decrease from around July 2012 until and somewhat after the halving (which was end november 2012 if I recall correctly).

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?showDataPoints=false&show_header=true&daysAverageString=1&timespan=all&scale=1&address=

[2] You shouldn't use logarithmic data when we're looking for a fall on the linear scale. It's even more helpful to use the averaged option as well:

https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?showDataPoints=false&timespan=all&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address=

For example if number 1 happened we would see a fall to about 600kGH... Out of curiosity I wrote a script to search for crashes and found a few. It's calculated using the average 14 days, then comparing the new value.

These are all over 25%:



Most of these were from the very beginning. Really the only one that I'd call a crash is "13/01/2015 18:15:05"

It's not something that I'll personally be negotiating this week, but surely it's not totally inconceivable for some entities outside of China to enter into profit-sharing agreements with hydro-based providers

50+ btc order on polo... Next run?

Looking at a Mr. Robot article ( http://www.hngn.com/articles/190251/20160318/mr-robot-season-2-premiere-date-news.htm )

"Creator Sam Esmail revealed in a recent interview that the second season will heavily focus on encryption and privacy just as the FBI is currently locked in a battle with Apple over the same exact issues in reality. Esmail believes it's something that will only grow in importance over the next decade and that because the average viewer may not understand the complexities of the issue, he wants to bring it to the forefront this season and explore all of its intricacies."

If this series opens up the minds of the masses, it would be amazing!

Yes, plan your trade AND trade your plan  

Oh and don't plan trades while in some altered state of mind  

Because their primary concern is not how the network operates. They want to take over the governance. XT's "we need 8mb/20mb blocks urgently" (last year) or hearn's fud like "btc will CRASH next year" (a year ago), were just FUD to create a problem-reaction-solution sequence.


Precisely. And fees are ridiculously low to even do that (like 0.05$ for first block inclusion lower prices for lower priorities like 0.01$ - 0.02$)


It's even usable for micropayments like 20 cents, if you don't mind the confirmation delay and go with fees like 1-2 cents.


It isn't.


Some of the bitcoin core devs are also working for Blockstream. I don't remember the exact number but it's not that large, compared to the total contributors.

Difficulty History

Date   Difficulty   Change   Hash Rate
Apr 01 2016   166,851,513,283   0.82%   1,194,369,655 GH/s
Mar 18 2016   165,496,835,118   4.46%   1,184,672,491 GH/s
Mar 04 2016   158,427,203,767   -3.10%   1,134,066,098 GH/s
Feb 19 2016   163,491,654,909   13.44%   1,170,318,852 GH/s
Feb 07 2016   144,116,447,847   20.06%   1,031,625,717 GH/s
Jan 26 2016   120,033,340,651   5.89%   859,232,121 GH/s
Jan 13 2016   113,354,299,801   9.12%   811,421,684 GH/s
Dec 31 2015   103,880,340,815   11.16%   743,604,444 GH/s
Dec 18 2015   93,448,670,796   18.14%   668,931,642 GH/s
Dec 06 2015   79,102,380,900   8.77%   566,236,898 GH/s
Nov 24 2015   72,722,780,643   10.44%   520,569,941 GH/s
Nov 11 2015   65,848,255,180   5.77%   471,360,171 GH/s
Oct 29 2015   62,253,982,450   2.25%   445,631,364 GH/s

800mn GH/s (out of 1.2bn) were added in the last 5 months. So 2/3rds of the hashpower should, in theory, be representative of state of the art equipment which has an intended lifespan beyond the halving. And there are quite a few months ahead of us for upgrading or introducing more efficient hardware. I think all this equipment is here to stay (and mine). A small hashrate drop is possible though. Larger drops are possible if combined with a price collapse.