Crypto Mining Blog

Looking at the numbers showing what the next difficulty adjustment will bring to the Litecoin network we are seeing yet another significant increase in the total network hashrate and thus the difficulty. The current prognosis is for over 7% increase in a few hours and looking at the previous difficulty adjustments we are seeing a steady increase with not so little steps lately. This trend shows that while some Scrypt ASIC manufacturers have stopped their production and cancelled future plans for new hardware others are still making and shipping hardware. It seems that MAT are finally shipping mining hardware, as well as Alcheminer most likely, KnC is still shipping Titans and probably Bitmain is already testing their first AntMiner L1 Scrypt ASICs as well.

Looking at what is happening with Bitcoin in terms of network hashrate we are seeing that unlike Litecoin there is a slight decrease in the hashrate and thus the next network difficulty might be lower by about 1.5% or even more. This is something that we are not used to seeing this when talking about Bitcoin, especially lately. If the trend continues and we see a drop in the network difficulty this would be a sign that old ASIC mining hardware is being taken offline and the new miners brought online at the moment are not able to fill that gap. This all is apparently coming from large scale mining operations that operate on a business model of mining and selling the mined coins immediately, regardless of the current exchange rate as these are not looking at Bitcoin in perspective and take into account the profitability at the moment and if it is really worth to continue using old mining hardware with the current conditions.