Topic: What is the reason for the spike in difficulty in early 2014? (Read 1565 times)
big hardware/asic manufacturers farming with max power before selling the used models on to us
first "public" ASIC as far as I know was sometime between jan-mar of 2013 (february, I think). that was batch one of the avalons. the people that got those made some crazy amount of money (even if they sold the bitcoins as they got them, it was something like $300 per day).
Was dry for a bit after that, then this ASICMiner company?? I think it was, started swindling people out of some godawful amount of money for some crap USB ASICs and what not... ofc they only sold at rates that made it more profitable for them to sell them off rather than mining with them themselves.
Not sure about that bizarre 2x jump. (maybe that was when mtgox got the price up to > $1000 or something)
Was dry for a bit after that, then this ASICMiner company?? I think it was, started swindling people out of some godawful amount of money for some crap USB ASICs and what not... ofc they only sold at rates that made it more profitable for them to sell them off rather than mining with them themselves.
Not sure about that bizarre 2x jump. (maybe that was when mtgox got the price up to > $1000 or something)
The chart doesn't look quite right, although if it is ASICs definitely boosted the difficulty. That and the higher prices.
the price was much higher, we were in the 1200 peak area, thus the diff skyrocket
Too bad you don't remember what site it's from, but it looks like that graph is not quite right for the network. You can check other sources for network hash rate estimates over time, e.g.:
https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=
and you'll see that the change is much more gradual, which fits with ASICs coming online (which, yes, are certainly the main cause of the curve going the way it is on proper charts).
Perhaps it's from a specific pool, though? In that case, the jump could be because more miners joined that pool. There was some concern about Ghash.io getting to be too large, so a lot of miners changed to different pools at that time. That was in mid-2014. I'm not sure if the picture you've added showing a range from january to july is actually showing that range (in which case that would fit)... or hours around the 17th of january (in which case.. no idea.)
https://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty?timespan=2year&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address=
and you'll see that the change is much more gradual, which fits with ASICs coming online (which, yes, are certainly the main cause of the curve going the way it is on proper charts).
Perhaps it's from a specific pool, though? In that case, the jump could be because more miners joined that pool. There was some concern about Ghash.io getting to be too large, so a lot of miners changed to different pools at that time. That was in mid-2014. I'm not sure if the picture you've added showing a range from january to july is actually showing that range (in which case that would fit)... or hours around the 17th of january (in which case.. no idea.)
Continuing on from this thread; So I was able to find another chart that looks to be from the same website. I have no idea what these charts are doing in my hard drive so perhaps some insight into their content might provide a reason for why they are there. Anyway, this one seems to show the mining difficulty from Jan 2013 to Jul 2014. Is the trend correct? What is the reason for the spike in difficulty in early 2014? Was it due to the introduction of ASICs?
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