Interesting Things In Bitcoin Land

Butterfly Labs continues to claim progress in shipping their miners. To date, they have apparently shipped all of their orders through July 2012 and are beginning to tackle August 2012 orders.

However, people receiving their Jalepeno’s will be confronted with a vastly higher network difficulty upon receipt of those units – indeed, the network difficulty just made its biggest leap upwards ever. Of course, it’s been a long time since orders were first taken, and most everyone has now assumed that the value proposition that was originally offered is far smaller than they originally calculated. Even so, these units are causing a huge leap in the difficulty.

Accompanying the leap in difficulty, there has been a recent falloff in the BTC/USD exchange rate, with not real explanation as to why it is happening. Suddenly, though, mining alt.coins is becoming a much more attractive proposition.

Change is certainly afoot in the Bitcoin world. It’s certain that the final nails are going into the coffins of GPU mining operations, though whether that is correlated to changes in the price of Bitcoins is anyone’s guess. The good news of all of this is that, if Butterfly’s statements about shipping of units is true, then the concentration of hashing power on the network will finally start tilting away from ASICMiners operation.

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