Bitcoin's mining difficulty has increased by 41.9% over the last 30 days
Nobody on HN pointed out who is behind the increase... This is BitFury who just launched a 40 megawatt data center filled up with their new 16 nm chips which reportedly achieve approximately 0.06 joule per gigahash. They also use immersion cooling which gives them an insane PUE of 1.02. So the mining capacity of this DC alone is ~650 Phash/s! We saw an increase of ~200 Phash/s in the last 30 days, so presumably they are at only operating at 1/3rd of their capabilities so far:<p>40e6 (watt) / 0.06 (joule/gigahash) / 1e6 (petahash/gigahash) = ~650 petahash/second<p>BitFury's immersion cooling tech:<p><a href="http://datacenterfrontier.com/immersion-cooling-bitcoin/" rel="nofollow">http://datacenterfrontier.com/immersion-cooling-bitcoin/</a><p><a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MDhqNyXE&t=0m42s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uV7MDhqNyXE&t=0m42s</a> (shows the fluid boiling - starts at 0m42s)<p><a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/BitFury-Launch-Energy-Efficient-Immersion-Cooling-Data" rel="nofollow">https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151211005837/en/Bit...</a><p>BitFury's 16nm chips:<p><a href="http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitFury-Announces-Mass-Production-Fastest-Effective-16nm" rel="nofollow">http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151216005453/en/BitF...</a>