Is difficulty ramping for some reason?

[JeremyCT]

I feel like difficulty is increasing faster than usual lately, but I don't know where I'd get data to prove/disprove that? Anybody else noticed this?

 

[Ericsson]

What are you mining?

I am mining zcash and use flypool. And yes it seems to me difficulty is going up in the past several days. I also notice the overall pool's hash rate is climbing -- isn't that what is happening with mining in general and therefore difficult goes up? I am new in the arena so I haven't figured it all out yet.

 

[JeremyCT]

I mine with Nicehash. It seems like my overall earnings have decreased despite an increase in my total mining power. Everything seems to be working as it should though, so difficulty is my scapegoat.

 

[NiHaoMike]

You can pretty much always expect difficulty to go up over time. About the only time it ever goes down by any significant amount is when the coin drops a lot in value.

 

[JeremyCT]

You can pretty much always expect difficulty to go up over time. About the only time it ever goes down by any significant amount is when the coin drops a lot in value.

That much I know, but it seems as though it's doubled in the past 2-3 weeks alone. My BTC/day rate with 2 cards currently is what it was with 1 card less than a month ago.

 

[NiHaoMike]

I have seen rapid increases in difficulty in the past, especially on "experimental" coins or coins that have recently spiked in value. The steepest difficulty spike I have seen was 8x in a month because the coin got ASICed.

 

[JeremyCT]

I guess the problem is that $/BTC isn't really moving, so my profitability is toileting as the difficulty spikes. If it keeps up this way, I think we'll start seeing a large amount of used cards on the market. Mine already have a post-mining use plan, thankfully.

 

[mackerel]

I'm only doing Ether, and roughly it now takes me around 6 days to get 0.1, compared to around 5 days in January. Not exact, and there will be variables as one of my faster cards is part time.

More positively, the $ value of Ether seems to have stabilised for the last couple of weeks around 800-900-ish making things more predictable.

 

[Tech Tweaker]

Yeah, seems to me the last couple of weeks like profitability is down for Equihash algorithm mining (and several other algorithms) on NiceHash. Checking the Equihash mining stats page just now, overall Hashrate and number of active miners are slightly lower now than they were in a screenshot I have from November, but number of active orders is much higher (400-500 more), and overall payout per day is less than 1/4 of what it was that day in November. I'm guessing maybe people are putting more cards online lately to make up for the loss/decrease in daily revenue and/or more miners are getting into the pool?

CryptoNight profitability is half (or less) of what it was in November-January, as I was seeing $1.5-2/day on my best CPU for mining (making it pretty profitable at the time, with an estimated power cost of $0.30/day), and now it's $0.45-0.60/day.

My 1080 is now less profitable than my 980 Ti was back in November, even though the $/BTC pricing is similar. I was seeing daily earnings around 0.00025-0.000325 BTC for my 1080 alone just 1-1.5 months ago, but lately I'm lucky to see 0.00016-0.00022 BTC (say $1.8-2.4/day) for the 1080 alone (aside from occasional spikes on Lyra2REv2 and Nist5 to 0.00022-0.00026 BTC). I was seeing 0.00024-0.00035 on the 980 Ti back around November.

I was hitting the NH wallet payout minimum in 2-3 days in January and early February, lately though it's looking like 5-7 days with my hardware (1080+970) without CPU mining (because it's much less profitable lately).

 

[Johan45]

I've seen the same, especially like you say the cryptonight

 

[Tech Tweaker]

Did some looking into this, apparently the price of ZClassic crashed/tanked (and it is one of the coins mined under Equihash), so it is one coin that is lowering profitability (word is there are a lot of alt coins that are down in value lately (last several weeks potentially)). Went from a high of $199.24 USD on Feb 19, 2018 to $9.01 USD on Mar 4, 2018.

ZenCash is also down around ~$12/coin in value since just three days ago, so there's at as well.

Not sure why it went down so much yet, but that's what I'm reading online in some forums/posts.

 

[deathman20]

I've noticed in the last 2 Months at least mining with Zec, difficulty has increased roughly 25-30%.
Though the previous 4 months leading up to that it was relatively flat with a minor few percentage point increases that I noticed.

I think we are dealing with last years Nov/December fallout from the HUGE spike in prices. Though the difficulty increases really didn't seem to hit till January sometime.

 

[sno.lcn]

I feel like more people are buying time on nicehash and upping difficulty all over the board. I've ben switching coins whenever a nicehash spike happens. Even though I think nicehash ruins mining for normal people, I do have a few miners pointed at nicehash, and my earnings there have been fairly consistent.

 

[Ericsson]

Coinwarz has nice charts for difficulty.
For example:
zcash https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/zcash-difficulty-chart
ETH https://www.coinwarz.com/difficulty-charts/ethereum-difficulty-chart