uhhh pitythepool's waaaay over 51%!
ctrlaltdefeated hasn't gone over 25-30MH o_o
huge hash rate increase, was almost 100MH! :O
if it gets over about 200MH it's just about no longer worth me mining at the predicted value :/
The opportunity price is a recommended selling price based on how hard it is to mine. In other words, if it reaches 200MH/S, difficulty is expected to rise to 6.4. This means that any AIRcoin you have at that point, to new adopters, is worth at least 0.0023 BTC. It assumes that, when the difficulty rises, people will want to buy the coins rather than mine them, and miners will want to mine other coins, so as the hashrate increases, the recommended selling price goes up. In other words, when a miner says "Why buy a coin when I can mine it?" they change their mind at this price to "Well, I can buy cheaper than [opportunity price] and mine something else more profitable."
Since both buy orders and hashrates are good measurements of demand, it's a pretty strong assumption. This is one of the core theories Alexander brought to the community that has held strength in determining our block reward and premine amounts.
Next difficulty increase is projected at close to 3.2, putting the next period opportunity price at
In other words:
Difficulty - Opportunity Price
.99 - 0.00033 BTC, $0.165 USD
2.3 - 0.00075 BTC, $0.375 USD
3.2 - 0.00115 BTC, $0.575 USD
6.4 - 0.00230 BTC, $1.150 USD
It's the "strike price" to a miner who didn't care what coin he was mining, but only cares about mining the most profitable coin. Any price above that, AIRcoin would be the best mining investment compared to most commonly listed and traded altcoins. Any price below that, an there may be other coins that are better. Since you guys
do care about what coin you are mining and expect this coin to do very well, you may be willing to hold the coins until the price rises further, but this would be the minimum price to sell at to make it "worth your time" so to say, at each difficulty level assuming you get a fair share of coins. It also means that any coins mined at a lower difficulty level, since they will be sold to individuals at higher difficulty levels, will see that proportional increase.
In the case of most coins, inflation lowers the price faster than miners can go buy coins instead of mining them, and that results in an unsustainable position (pick any "animal coin" with 100,000+ rewards in the last month and watch its chart, you'll see what I mean). But even low-reward coins aren't exempt from that. When difficulty increases and exchange rate decreases, that's when a coin starts to fail. Our goal is to keep them both in balance to produce no effective inflation.
As for now, until we can find more pools, hashrates are going to be uneven. Our team is considering bounties for additional pools, but if the community would like to step up and create some more (we have already one member attempting to do so) or attract new pools and miners we would highly encourage it. Our team is reaching out to pool managers and miners who are willing to throw more hashing power our way.
Additionally, a block explorer IS under development and is almost complete and will be launched in the next few days.