Difficulty hopping - any true benefit in the long run?
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After we saw the value of FTC go from .0011BTC to .0023BTC virtually overnight, it seems as if it’s caught some serious attention. The thing that I’m curious about is whether or not difficulty hopping actually produces any benefit for these people taking the network from 2,000,000KHash/s up to 13,000,000KHash/s during periods when the difficulty drops. When the hashrate is low (difficulty seemingly high), it can take 20+ hours for the difficulty to retarget, so everyone mining technically receives less over that period of time. When the difficulty drops off, everyone starts mining and the network hashrate sky rockets. This seems to cause the retarget time to plummet as well to a fraction of what it was previously. When the retarget time is cut down (with easy difficulty), this means faster coins - but for less time if I’m understanding this correctly. If somebody tried implementing this difficulty hopping strategy for lets say a month, it seems as if they would just end up breaking even at the end versus if they just left the miner on 24/7 and mined through both high and low difficulties… thoughts?
-Ryan
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I hope that I can get a few blocks found soon and stop mooching off you guys!