Its' too bad that http://BitcoinSportsBook.com doesn't offer a current way to wager on that.  I'ld (hypothetically) put my money on the over, if I could.  Way over.

It would be very surprising (and easy to make money on mining) if difficulty (mining effort) did not follow the price.

I have my own independent estimate of the whole network's GHash/Second based on slush's posted GHash/Second and the percentage of all bitcoin blocks found by slush's pool. You can see my estimate if you install my Greasemonkey script and view slush's stats page.

For the first time since I started watching the total network number, my estimate fell below 400 GHash/second today. I assume this is a response to the recent drop in bitcoin prices.

Then I realized something. It is extremely easy to remove mining hardware from the network, but much harder to get new mining hardware to add to the network. I believe the two-week lag we see in the correlation between bitcoin prices and network hash rate only applies to increases in bitcoin prices, since it takes time to get new hardware bought and set up. I would expect that a decrease in bitcoin prices will result in a decrease in network hash rate almost immediately, and I believe we have just seen this happen.

I believe there are a few other things that miners take into consideration.  Even once the initial equipment has been paid for, there is an ongoing maintenance cost.  Most miners are buying consumer-grade power supplies, fans, etc.  These will begin to fail after a few months of 24/7 overclocking duty.  Then there is the noise if you don't have your equipment located in a server room or closet/cellar somewhere.  There is also the problem of cashing out or exchanging your BTC for local currency.  I think a lot of people got into mining without thinking everything through, and some are dropping out due to the expense/hassle/inconvenience.  We will lose a few more when summer comes to the northern hemisphere.  It is already 27C outdoors here.

Doesn't difficulty always change with a fixed frequency?


Btw, is there the risk of some "resonance" building up, where more and more people will mines during easy cycles, making difficulty increaae, then stop mining during hard cycles, making difficulty decrease?

I don't mean buying and seeling hardware, just not turning it on during the periods you aren't gonna have profit to cut the losses(sp?)