I have read that Bitcoins produced will be 30% less in the next 3-5 days, as the difficulty level will rise again. True?
The current difficulty is 25,998.
http://blockexplorer.com/q/getdifficultyThe next difficulty estimate is here:
http://blockexplorer.com/q/estimateIf that level persists, that will mean the difficulty will rise more than 30% at the next retarget block (in approx 3 days):
http://blockexplorer.com/q/nextretargetThat's the fastest rate in quite a while:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=0AmcTCtjBoRWUdHVRMHpqWUJValI1RlZiaEtCT1RrQmcSee:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/DifficultyAll the people dumping money into 5870's and 5970's very recently are going to need that much more money per Bitcoin to recover their investment on hundreds of dollars (if not thousands in some cases).
If the BTC/USD exchange rate stays the same, then yes a higher difficulty than previously estimated will likely mean a longer length of time before the investment in hardware is returned by a producing rig.
But adding the high equipment cost into the equation, along with increased difficulty in mining and HUGE recent entry into the market, I predict Bitcoins are stable at a US Dollar and will quickly go up in a very short time.
Higher costs for mining really have little to do with BTC/USD exchange rate. There does appear to be a correlation where when the BTC/USD price goes up, that rise in price attracts more investment in mining. However, that is a relationship that lags by several weeks:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.42269What do you think?
If the miners are cashing in their bitcoins that their rigs (or contracts) are producing because of the high investments made, then there will be more daily selling volume than what we've seen previously. Prior to the runup to parity, there were many days that the per-day total number of bitcoins traded on Mt. Gox was well below the number of bitcoins minted for the day. We are likely to see miners accumulate fewer, on average, than what has previously been seen.
Now will that increased selling activity cause the exchange rate to go down, I'm not even going to try to speculate. I might suggest that anyone contemplating selling first consider what this might mean:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=bitcoin&ctab=0&geo=all&date=ytd