Mining difficulty and network hashrates
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I noticed something interesting the last few days, the network hashrate jumps when nearing a difficulty adjustment and all of a sudden we are generating blocks in 1.5-2 minutes and the difficulty stays nearly the same or jumps up. then shortly after the adjustment the network hashrate falls and it is taking 4-5 minutes per block.
would it make more sense for stability if the difficulty adjusted based on a time frequency maximum in addition to block maximum? That would eliminate the 8 hour adjustment periods lately.
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I am pretty sure that the new diff adjustments are supposed to be every 8 hours. Everything is working just fine, all altcoins fluxuate due to max profit coin hopping miners. We talked about the Diff adjustment for FTC for months and came up with a great solution. You should have seen what FTC was like with the original diff adjustments…a few of us would mine for weeks with almost no one else between the diff spikes.
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if block generation is 2.5 minutes diff target should change every 5 hours or so.
and once again it spiked to 4.8 Mh/s at the diff change and dropped to 2.7Mh/s shortly after.
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I think the drop of hash rate after a difficulty adjustment is -at least partially- caused by the mining optimizers, which direct miners to other coins, as the profit in mining FTC drops at the adjustment.
We can’t avoid that, but it will get better over time, if the average hash rate will increase.
The goal of the adjustment is to keep the block rate as close to 1 block per 2.5 minutes as possible, therefore the block rate must be the basis for the adjustments. A constant block rate guarantees stable transaction times, as a block is nothing more as the container uses to send FTC around.
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the stability of the block rate is what I was concerned about.
since the FTC price bubble the hash rates went from 2.7 Mh/s to over 6.5Mh/s and the difficulty will adjust up highly
like you said, the profitability pools will see that FTC price has come down and difficulty has risen and they jump ship, leaving the block generation at 3.5-4.5 minutes per block. I watched it happen a few times over the last few days.
