difficulty is going through the roof right now
while its true that difficulty is going up... it has actually slowed down, and thats a natural consequence of the number being so high that its becoming harder and harder to double every month like it has been for the last few months. i don't expect it to keep doubling every month this year... it may do once or twice more, but i think the days of doubling are hopefully almost over...
AND.. if you do the math on how much each GH costs... AND how much power is being used.. there are upper limits on how many GH's we can have, and it will most likely be a lot lower than the mining forecast web apps are predicting for the end of 2014 (as they just double each month for 12 months.. which is extremely unlikely and impossible to achieve)
-- Jez
difficulty will only stop doubling when there is no money left to be made in hardware, ie: hw manufacturing cost basis = price the market is willing to pay. Currently take the best example - 180GH antminer is going for around 3 btc = $3000, it cost them <$300 at max to make those things (just hardware & manufacturing, not factoring in initial research cost).
So we have a long way to go before difficulty slows down. And it will always overshoot as all manufacture pump out miners until a point they realize they cant sell them anymore and have to lose money to get rid of inventory. With 28/20nm now near end, there is nothing left but a race to the bottom.
Expect 20-40% increase every cycle until end of 2014, then the difficulty will likely to slow down, by then you can get a 2-4TH miner for <$1000 assume btc remains at $1000
So in essence it will come to a point of a margin above electricity costs like...well err...like graphics cards were?
By the way difficult has begun to slow down if you hadn't noticed. There will be periods where it increases and then becomes less dramatic like waves hitting a beach and being pulled back out to sea until the ASIC storm passes and we're back to where GPUs were.
Sorry for pointing out the bleeding obvious, but did you really believe that plugging in a box of tricks is a long term sustainable business unless you have access to significant hardware and cheap and accessible electricity?
Those margins will be squeezed whilst there is profit to be made from idley doing nothing.
Want to make lots of money? Then innovate a creative means of making Bitcoin infinitely more accesible to a mainstream audience, i.e. The general public in the west and especially the developing world where a unit of account divisible by 100 millionths makes microcredit feasible with the technology they have access to.
That sounds like work though doesn't? Probably why so few are concentrating on something infinitely more important to Bitcoins success than hoarding coins...