Print Page - Calculating Difficulty from Getwork "Target" Value

According to the wiki (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty), difficulty can be calculated by dividing the maximum target by the current target.

However, I'm unclear on how exactly the target value returned from a getwork call is encoded (and more importantly, how it should be de-encoded to calculate difficulty using this method).

Do I simply swap it to little-endian (and if so, how?), or is there a more complicated process?

Example code (Python) using the current target:

Code:

>> target = "00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000006e8102000000000000"
>> target = process(Target)
>> maxtarget = "00000000ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"
>> difficulty = int(maxtarget, 16) / int(target, 16)
>> print difficulty
6695826

Any advice would be appreciated.

Simply swapping to little-endian does the trick.

For reference:

Code:

>> target = "00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000006e8102000000000000"
>> target = target.decode('hex')
>> target = target[::-1]
>> target = target.encode('hex')
>> maxtarget = "00000000ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff"
>> difficulty = int(maxtarget, 16) / int(target, 16)
>> print difficulty
6695928 # Slightly different because I'm using the non-truncated maximum target

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Bitcoin => Bitcoin Technical Support => Topic started by: BinaryMage on April 02, 2013, 09:02:21 AM