Bitcoin mining difficulty has been constantly rising since October 2016 and today for the first time in 8 month the Bitcoin network difficulty declined by 0.43%. This is direct consequence of subtracted hashpower from the mining network from previous 5,094,526,985 GH/s to current 5,072,782,052 GH/s. This is indeed great news for all of us who are invested in Bitcoin mining.
Declining hashpower
First signs of network hashpower subtraction appeared few days ago, when my Genesis-Mining daily results after constant decline - suddenly rose up.
Certainly vast majority of new miners are choosing to mine altcoins since it is more affordable and easier to enter with small budget. The largest players in Bitcoin mining are eating up all the small fishes in this ocean. Genesis Mining CEO and Co-Founder Marco Streng in one of a recent interview mentioned that to enter Bitcoin mining business your pockets have to be able to find more than 10 million USD. And that just a initial investment. That is why miners are switching to other more profitable and easy to mine cryptocurrencies.
Bitcoin price stability
There is more hype in altcoins than in cryptocurrency king itself and looks like rumors and speculations are more affecting altcoins than Bitcoin right now. And while the whole market swings up and down in recent weeks, but Bitcoin seems to be more stable than others, managing to withhold above 2400 USD/BTC price. Seems like new ICO's and Ethereum awaited forking gravitates all the attention leaving Bitcoin to get stronger giving it more time to create solutions for its problems.
And this is very good for the market and cryptocurrencies as a whole, since when only Bitcoin finally will mature enough to maintain its stability - people will be willing more and more use it for payments and daily operations - and I think finally Bitcoin will enter fiat money markets and lives of common citizens. Maybe it is not time yet, but it is certainly first steps after insane rolercoaster of price fluctuation. Though the record high 3000 USD/BTC price brought a lot of attention to Bitcoin and with this publicity in mainstream media - it introduced cryptocurrencies to amazingly wide audiences like never before.
Prolonged life of mining contracts
In my previous article I've calculated my Open-Ended mining contract lifespan - which appeared to be only 408 days (because of constantly increasing network difficulty), but after current difficulty decline, looks like my "lifetime" contract could be prolonged. If this decline is only temporarily (it has happened before) then my miner won himself at least 2 weeks of profitable mining time before it gets shut down.
Looks like current combination of Bitcoin price drop and stabilization at 2400 USD/BTC mark, large players concentration and domination at Bitcoin mining and easier entry to mine altcoins - gives the perfect recipe to network difficulty decline. Looks like owning cloud mining contract may bring the investment back if such a combination will be able to withstand for a longer time (my earlier calculations were against ROI).
What do you think, what consequences this decline will bring up? Will it make more miners to switch back to mine Bitcoin - which will increase Hashpower as well as network difficulty or will it may hold up for a while?