Economic impact of 31% Litecoin difficulty adjustment on mining

In about 19 hours (20/21 April), the Litecoin network difficulty will adjust by approximately 31%. In economic terms, that means that miners will earn roughly 31% less - just what sort of impact will this have on a bigger scale?

Current difficulty

Since the battle around SegWit has heated up, numerous new miners have joined the network, thus prompting it to adjust the difficulty to compensate for the added hash rate. As of today, we’re at 102,267 with an estimated, future difficulty of 135,302.

EC2 Hash Rate EC2 Hash Rate

Source: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/

Impact on rewards

Based on a very basic calculation, I’ve estimated total mining rewards based on the current exchange rate of 10.48 LTCUSD over 24 hours at 1 GH/s.

Before adjustment: $103.70 / day
After adjustment: $78.35 / day

Impact on network

Based on the current hash rate of 3912 GH/s, mining rewards would collapse from $405,674 to $306,505. A difference of $99,169 across the network.

EC2 Hash Rate