The difficulty increase is a reaction to the network hash rate and since it computes looking back two weeks, it always lags. It is supposed to keep the average time between blocks around 10 minutes, but in all of 2013, it was around 8 minutes, so it is still lagging. When I ran the numbers, it was amazing to see a bi-weekly average of 34% growth for the network hash rate for 2013.
The conventional wisdom is that at some point the "Law of big numbers" will take hold and we won't see the kind of growth in hash rate we saw in 2013. I read another poster on another forum make this case and it was also put forward by Emmanuel (CEO of cloudhashing.com) at the
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JkBu5_hZgWI Coinsummit conference in San Francisco last week. And the numbers seemed to be slowing down, but in the last 2 days the network hash rate has crossed 50 PetaHashes from a low of 37 PetaHashes which is mind-boggling.
Even though HighBitCoin is in the business of building 1+ PetaHash data center ready systems, it is difficult for us to explain a swing of 5-10 Peta Hashes in such time frame. With the exception of Bitfury which has gone dark, we know all the major ASIC mining hardware companies out there and roughly what the supply side of the equation looks like. 5 PetaHashes of network capacity is a huge data center with over 200 racks of systems and to see that kind of capacity switch on/off seems crazy.
A lot of what I did in my past life was analyze data and provide insights, so this aspect of the network hash rate troubles me. Leaving aside who is behind this increase, a few questions come to mind:
1. Do we trust the data (charts on blockchain.info and other places) and assume this wide fluctuation in network capacity is real?
2. Individual miners wouldn't act in concert to cause this massive increase/decrease in capacity. We are seeing a massive increase even though the price of bitcoin has dropped in the last few days, so I wonder whats behind sudden large increases in 48 hours as opposed to a gradual increase?
3. What is the incentive for even large scale miners to take their capacity offline especially when the price of bitcoin is not going down? (unless it is just before the timed increase of difficulty). There seems to be a weak correlation between hash rate and BTC price
Look forward to theories, speculation or ideas to help understand what's going on...
thanks for reading
Prakash
http://highbitcoin.com