my machines are struggling to find shares
Enough
It already costs at least double in electricity to find any gold
What IDIOT keeps advancing the difficulty ??
Nope, difficulty hasn't increased since last increase a couple days ago.
the difficulty has increased rapidly as the network hashing speed has increased rapidly (it has almost quadrupled in the past 45 days), probably mostly due to bitcoin being mentioned on slashdot.org.
but the computation speed is already dropping like a stone, due to many of the curious losing interest, so the difficulty will be dropping massively next adjustment.