Are you guys leaving the default settings on the genesis block calculator again? 130% per month growth - sure, that sustainable forever, no problem.
Forever, of course not. But there is a reason growth is exponential. its no coincidence the network hashrate since the first asics has perfectly followed an exponential curve; as almost always, if you see exponential growth there is a feedback loop. Every GH added to the network increases difficulty. Higher difficulty leads to lower mining profitability per GH, which leads to lower market prices per GH (until we approach vendors marginal profitability), which leads to more GH being added to the network.
So how long will it last? until we hit one of two constraints:
- vendors ability to deliver/deploy ever increasing numbers. If that happens growth will become linear rather than exponential.
- we approach marginal profitability, ie it costs more to produce/sell/deploy asic based miners than they are expected to earn in mining revenue over a reasonable time period (=market price or self mining opportunity).
We are very far way from the latter, literally at least one order of magnitude and potentially almost 2 orders of magnitude at todays BTC exchange rate.
As for the former, that one is hard to judge, but Josh boasting of 1000 units shipped in a day (if a similar volume can one day be achieved for Monarchs that could mean 10+ PH per month for BFL alone) and looking at the assembly plant that Hashfast contracted, I dont think widespread capacity constraints are likely to hit us anytime soon either.
So yeah, exponential growth will inevitably stop, but probably much later than you think. I dont see it happening before 100PH at least.
