what is behind the increase in Mining power

[schnuber]

In the last two month mining power has trippled.
Where is this power coming from? I can only think of ASIC's. But I thought they are not available yet, referring to the BFL issue.
Or is BFL mining for themselves until difficulty is so high that it is hardly profitable anymore and then they will eventually ship their ASIC's to "normal" customers?

[sLide.]

I'm not taking a stance on the BFL in this paragraphs that's going to come next, BUTTT!!!

If BFL "is" "mining" with the finite amount of machines that could built to date, and if that tripled the hashing difficulty, it still would be profitable to mine since these machines would be shipped and reallocated to "normal" miners which wouldn't affect the already affected hash rate.  The great thing about bitcoin's are there are only so many, and sooner or later, they will be mined.  Once that happens, it's going to be a very interesting time in BitCoin. 

Yeah, did they, under this hypothetical situation, would of profited, yeah.  But in the end...it all equals out. 

As far as the increase, it's a theory that with the increased exposure from media outlets, I believe we have more miners in general.  I'm not discrediting FPGA's and the limited, at least I believe, amount of ASIC's that are out there,  I don't believe they have a majority of the hash power YET.  And I stronger CAP that word...YET. 

[schnuber]

I assumes that as soon ASIC's are being shipped on a larger scale mining power will simply explode.

We should not forget, ASICS are the best thing for bitcoin if we want it to succeed. Because they are powerfull and consume far less power than other technologies. And that is what bitcoin needs in order to be competitive with other currencies. Of course miners only want to make profits and that is why they sometimes resent the upcoming of ASICs because it will make their existing hardware outdated. But again, ASICs is exactly what bitcoin needs in order to be succesfull.

[SolarSilver]

In the last two month mining power has trippled.
Where is this power coming from? I can only think of ASIC's. But I thought they are not available yet, referring to the BFL issue.

Fortunately there are more competent companies than BFL out there doing ASIC product development

Avalon shipping 300 units @ 70 GH/s in their batch #1 (http://launch.avalon-asics.com/) and ASICminer (see http://deepfriedcat.com/ for fancy graphs) has about 20 TH/s online by now. And ASICminer is auctioning off various quantities of their 10 GH/s blades (about 200 by now).

Or is BFL mining for themselves until difficulty is so high that it is hardly profitable anymore and then they will eventually ship their ASIC's to "normal" customers?

Speculation

[crazyates]

There are 2 main reasons why the network hashrate is growing:

#1) ASICs. ASICMiner has brought many TH/s online, and has even started selling their blades to customers (at a ridiculous cost, tho. It's barely worth it). Avalon has shipped as well, but all of their units are in customer hands, they don't mine any. BFL has started shipping, but limited amounts.

#2) Price drives difficulty. This has been proven elsewhere. Even if there were no ASICs, we would still have a ginormous network hashrate. When the price hit slowly but surely increasing in price from $20-$250 like it did over the past several months, it attracts new miners. It also encourages existing miners to expand their operations, as every BTC mined is now worth more.

[infoporter]

I can't help but notice from that graph that a single entity, AsicMiner, currently owns about 25% of the Bitcoin network hashrate. As their stock increases and they continue to add THs to their network, wouldn't they naturally approach a true 51% attack capability?

I doubt that is the plan, but it's already at 25% and growing extremely fast. It peaked at 30% and doubled it's speed in a matter of a week even... If it were to double it's speed again, it would already be at 51% attack capability.