With the tenth adjustment in the Bitcoin mining difficulty for 2015, the difficulty has increased to 48,807,487,245. Today's adjustment represents an increase of 2.44% over May 3rd's difficulty of 47,643,398,018. The global hash rate as of today's change stands at 349,377,603 GH/s.
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Meh. It's just noise until it's stayed at this level for a week. We've seen two-day-long jumps like this before with no explanation besides randomness.
Remember, nobody knows the actual hashrate, we just get a series of stochastically-incorrect approximations of it.
Yeah, the number I quote is just the average over the last 504 blocks at the time of the change of difficulty. I've included that as a footnote in previous updates but dropped it, but I guess I'll include it again in future.
504 blocks is actually not a very large sample if you're trying to detect a 2.4% change.
Also keep in mind that there is a massive and statistically significant correlation between hashrate and (block_height mod 2016).
In other words, the hashrate goes up at a significantly above-average rate as we get closer to a difficulty adjustment, then plunges right after the adjustment.
It makes sense… when there are only a few blocks left until the adjustment it's almost certain which way it will adjust (up or down). If adjusting up, then the blocks just before the adjustment are a poorer time for maintenance and downtime.