Topic: Total Network Hash Rate Speculation (Read 2364 times)

thing is, if you look at the history part of the spreadsheet you'll see figurer near even above 50% from period to period, which indicates that 50% monthly growth certainly did occur in the last couple of months and consistently so.

question is will this trend continue. pro arguments are clear:
- asic manufacturers did produce and are producing and are indeed shipping.
- people seem to be buying the stuff. at least judging form the sales of usb bitcoin erupters which seem to be constantly out of stock even though ROI calculations for this stuff is almost never positive.
- once paid for and installed, miners have little incentives to switch asics off. at least till difficulty is 1000x current level at which point cost of electricity becomes a factor again.
- by the end of the year next-gen hardware is expected to be available triggering another investment cycle.

the con elements are weak:
- why bother mining with a 300 MH/s device at all? currently mining 24/7 for a month will yield 0.09 BTC which is roughly $9, by 1.1.2014 this will drop to 0.02 BTC/month or $2/month. Why would you bother with that at all? People should switch off just because the yields are meaningless.
- most vendors are not very reliable when it comes to shipping the product but they do request advance payment.
- at some point vendors will have to drop prices otherwise there will be no point in buying any mining hardware. so far they have been slow to do so.

Most importantly: huge increase in hash rate has detrimental effect on the number of individual miners. We should all know that the security of bitcoin relies in the distribution of hashing power not hashing power per se. One way to look at it is to imagine what would happen in the extreme case where we would have you one miner (let's say it's me) and this one miner would have a 10^100 (=googol) Hashes/s asic. Would network be safe under this scenario?

As always it is difficult to make predictions. Especially about the future.

Your growth of 50% per month is right in line with my 1.5% per day that I linked above, which I think is on the high side for a long-term projection.

Jspielberg, what where you using for a growth rate?

Exponential Projections put difficulty growth on Jan 1 around 550M... Personally I think that is going to be low by about 450M.  My gut is saying we will be closer to 1Billion difficulty (7.25PH global hash rate).

See my post with Wolfram alpha analysis link at:
https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/google-doc-with-exponential-fit-lead-time-and-linear-rate-target-236050

this is from my spreadsheet. In short 1.1.2014 we can expect Difficulty to be about 350'000'000

The network growth has ranged from 0% per day to most recently ~2% per day. I'm going by the blue line in each of the charts below to minimize variance.

2014-06-31 is ~318 days away.

0.5% per day for the next 318 days means the network will grow ~4.8x what it is today, or the difficulty will be ~244Million
1% per day for the next 318 days means the network will grow ~23x what it is today, or the difficulty will be ~1.1Billion
1.5% per day for the next 318 days means the network will grow ~113x what it is today, or the difficulty will be ~5.6Billion
2% per day for the next 318 days means the network will grow ~543x what it is today, or the difficulty will be ~27Billion

I think we'll be seeing 2% growth per day for quite a while while ASICs are rolled out, but I don't think we'll see a constant 2%. I think that number will go down after a bit.



Hope my answer helped.

This question comes up quite often - going from 100th to 200th is 100th - from 200th to 400th is 200th and from 400th to 800th is 400th.  Not to mention the price of hardware will have to come down or the price of BTC will have to go up for people to continue an interest in ASIC hardware.  People are already shunning pre-orders and complaining that their 2013 Q3 orders won't make ROI.  Then you have the manufactures who are spending a crap ton of money to build these things and can't afford to drop prices so we'll see a plateau (middle of next year?) where the difficulty will be in the much higher (1B+)...  at some point the idea that you can "print money" will falter, people will come to their senses and things will settle down.  So I think it'll be high - but getting there is going to be a ROUGH ride!

I'm editing this because I never posted an answer to the question!  End of Q2 2014 prediction is 450

Not sure about exact value, but around 1,3 Hobbit which is also 7/9 of Pikachu's tail.

how many hash is 1.5~2.5 difficulty?

1.5 billtion to 2.5 billion

Idunno. 20% increase per two weeks for 10 weeks, 10% increase per two weeks for 10 weeks, 5% increase per two weeks until Q2 2014 (call it June 16th)...

So... 43.42 wks -- we'll say 42 weeks and diff is currently 60M. 124.4M diff ~10wk in (~Oct 25), 200.37M diff ~20wk in (~Jan 3), then ~22 wks to June 16.

June 16, 2014 diff guesstimate: 342.7M


ETA: Oh, you wanted Q2 end. Let's just call it an even 350M, then.

How is it going to be by end of Q2 2014?
Thanks.