Is mining difficulty leveling out (Spring 2015)? How does this affect the economics of Bitcoin? Bitcoin mining difficulty has been through some interesting ups and downs lately. (I've supplied snapshots below to give context for future readers)

Considering its long history of pretty much only going up for years, I'm wondering what people involved with mining should think about this.

Some base questions:


What is the primary cause? Are miners leaving as new ones come it, or are new ones no longer interested?
Why are miners leaving/not starting?
If it truly is leveling, or at least resuming a slight growth pattern, how does this affect Bitcoin price in general? What about during "events" such as halving of the block reward?
In principal, should Bitcoin value be related to difficulty in a predictable way, and is this leveling something that facilitates that or not?
Lastly, does a stable difficulty help encourage Bitcoin's use in anyway? In other words, if people aren't getting into mining but are getting into Bitcoin, do they generally consider difficulty as a factor in this decision?




I'm not necessarily asking that you answer all those questions. Instead, I'm trying to show that I am interested in how an extended period of leveled and stable difficulty, as we seem to be heading into (Spring 2015), affects the economics of Bitcoin mining and use.



Here's snapshots of that page (clickable):
It's pretty easy.
The first asics where based on 90's technology, current asics are almost cought up now to recent chip technology.

So the asic industry has camped 15 years of tech advancement into 2 years.
Every couple of months the new asics where more than twice as fast. That caused the rapid hash increase.

Now that they are caught up with current tech we will go back to 10% efficienty increase per year again. Like in the gpu days. Back then the difficulty raised very slowely because gpu's also had a 10% efficienty increase per year on avarage.
When gpu's came to the scene you saw the same rapid growth that flattned again when everybody had switched to gpu's. The only reason it was just a short period is because retail gpu's where allready in line with the chiptechnology of the time. 

Now that asic efficienty improvements are in line with the industry the only way to increase hashpower is to have more machines instead of ever faster machines.

All that you are seeing is growth in hashes per watt flattning out, and with it difficulty growth flattning.