Maybe the recent spikes are just luck? Slush's pool just did 10 Blocks in the last 12 hours, with only 12 Ph/s.
The price is down 14% for the week. It's $248 at the time of this writing.
Downward price pressure and no new efficiency hardware should continue to apply force against the difficulty.
AntPool had some massive luck today too. I wonder if the little extra BTC is also having an effect on the price. This should all sort itself out in the next week or so.
It'll be interesting to see if Antpool stays lucky ... I wonder how accurate their reported hashrate is. Does it include Bitmain's own miners, for example? [EDIT: Actually it wouldn't make much sense for it to under-report its hashrate ... it would have to pay its miners more proportionally than they deserve]
Assuming pool reported hashrates are accurate, we're not at 377Ph/s (which is the estimate for this difficulty period so far). In fact, pools that report haven't shown that much of an increase. Slush's pool has solved blocks at a rate consistent with a pool running at close to 30Ph/s over the last 24 hours, but its been constantly reporting just over 12 Ph/s.
That said, even if its luck, its put us 40 blocks ahead of pace already. There's no reason to think bad luck will even it out, so even assuming luck has played a major role the past two days we're looking at a 3-5% increase this period. Possibly more depending on what Bitmain shipped. I'd be shocked if we jump over 10% though. That would mean 33 Ph/s was added to the network... seems a bit of a stretch.
