Even if a 1TH/s miner was produced every minute the difficulty would only increase about 212M per day. If we assume an exponential growth rate of 20% per difficulty change, the increase in hash rate would exceed the production rate of miners in early June. The growth in difficulty will become linear.
Why would it be linear? I don't get it. The production capacity of 28nm (or 14nm) products can be increasing at exponential rate. As long as human population increases at exponential (or near exponential) rate why would production (of asics or anything else) not be in step. It has been so far.
We still have enough resources on this rock to have a good exponential run for another 75-100 years or so.
There will be nothing linear about it in our lifetimes. Babies are born every minute and every minute there is a teenager somewhere who discovers crypto currencies and wants to make some money.
Technically any growth could be considered exponential even if very little. My question is will growth slow down from the 30% per change we are seeing now? I think we are currently in the "bitcoin gold rush" and just like the real gold rush we could see a bunch of the miners drop out5 leaving only the most efficient operations.
Gold rush will continue at least until 98% of coins are mined. We are at what? 50-60%. The miners don't drop out. They upgrade their hardware.
Penetration of bitcoin is very small. It will continue to attract more and more miners in years to come. Nothing will slow this down. Greed is good.
