It looks like people turned their miners back on. No matter what the difficulty changes to I'm pretty sure we can all agree it will be a very insignificant change. On the bright side we can look forward to around 20 more days of the same difficulty.
No, as I explained above, this was only a variance blip. Seems another picture is in order.
Every other comment I made is true though. We can expect insignificant changes to the next difficulty and that means around 20 days with no real change in difficulty.
There is no evidence of people turning on their rigs in the past 24 hours. You see a huge spike upwards, then you see a tremendous fall back downwards. What you can extrapolate from that is... not much, other than that variance can be quite crazy. Let it smooth out over the next day or so to get a better picture of where things are at now. I agree there will be a minor shift in difficulty, though I don't consider a drop in difficulty insignificant, from a resource gatherer perspective, if we indeed see one.
BTC Guild has had +32% luck for the last 24 hours, but unknown miners solved 5 blocks in the period it spiked as well: http://pident.artefact2.com/more
That is unusually many, so it seems likely that someone with a lot of mining power did some solo mining for a few hours.
That is unusually many, so it seems likely that someone with a lot of mining power did some solo mining for a few hours.
Not sure how you arrive at that conclusion. What is the motivation for someone with "a lot of mining power" to turn it on for a few hours, solve a few blocks and then turn it off? For a sense of what that suggests, 4TH/s is the equivalent of about 10,000 radeon 5870s, or 5,000 6990s. Who turns that on for a few hours?
It's actually much more likely that a buncha people got really lucky for a bit. BTCGuild was at -32% luck and then jumped to +32%, deepbit was solving blocks as fast as 5minutes at a time, slush probably did well too. Some unknowns found blocks. It's just variance.
