Bitcoin is getting increasingly harder to mine, but I didn't realise how steep the increase in difficulty was! apparently it's about 20% increase every two weeks. Any know more exact figures? wonder how that will effect the price as it's gets harder to mine more coins?
Bitcoin has a precise halving schedule. Every 210.000 blocks, the reward will be half of the 210.000 blocks before. Here is the exact schedule: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply DOGEcoin will halve as well in just a few days. As for what happens, I've watched it happen just to see how it works. IME it always has a speculative effect, on the first(and only so far) DOGE halving the difficulty shot up to over 3000 because everyone was mining DOGE, but once the halving came tons of people left so miners who remained in DOGE actually started earning more than right before the halving due to the difficulty decreasing more than 50% which compensated the 50% drop in rewards.
^^ thanks, that makes sense. i have a 12 month mining subscription with butterfly labs, but it seems a bit pointless now as by a few months time the mining power will be useless.
For DOGE there's speculation that that may be the case, but I don't think ASICs for scrypt are going to be cheap. Far as I've read(and I'm not expert) scrypt requires lots of memory, so the ASICs end up being as complex as a PC itself. Also, DOGE will be almost totally mined by this year's end, there'll be 100 billion of them, so I think there won't be time for ASICs to spread that and destroy GPU mining. BTC on the other hand is ASIC-only, there is zero change for GPUs.
