Miners, do please keep us informed here (or on the forums @ solarcoin.org) about your experience and observations (positive or negative) with the new diff retargeting. thanks!

As expected we are now retargeting difficulty every 15 blocks.

You can see a table of last blocks including difficulty on our block explorer at http://solarcoin.zapto.org/chain/solarcoin. The mining pools show the correct current difficulty but their "change in xx blocks" and "est. next difficulty" stats are still based on the 1440 retarget so will not be accurate until the pool operators get that updated.

Will be interesting to see how this affects network hashrate stability over the coming days.

Reminder: you can check the difficulty via the block explorer at http://solarcoin.zapto.org/chain/solarcoin or via your wallet client (getdifficulty or getmininginfo command from the terminal) .

After block 208440 we should see the diff changing every 15 blocks.

The 10 minute comment in the original source code is obviously a typo; it should say 15 minutes. The other branches are still a work in progress for testing purposes and still need to be cleaned up. No worries we will get that done!

To avoid any confusion when we hit the 208440 block, the mining pools will need to update their statistics to reflect the new 15 minute retargets. If that is not done the mining pool front end will not show the correct estimated next difficulty and change in xx blocks. That does not indicate any actual problems on the network, just a mistake in the mpos front end web page.

I already reached out to cryptopoolmining but have not heard back yet. Will also contact prominers now.

Pool operators in case you are reading this I believe you need to update the coindiffchangetarget value in your MPOS configuration.

Hello solarcoin miners, investors, and community. Thank you all for your patience while we prepare changes to the difficulty retargeting algorithm. We are currently testing digishield on the solarcoin testnet. Please know that we are doing our best to be thorough; even small seemingly innocuous code changes can have large unforeseen affects on the network. Our goal is to ensure a smooth hard fork and maintain ongoing solarcoin network stability. We will keep the community updated as we draw nearer to implementation.

In the meantime, there may be a bit of relief coming quite soon. There is a perhaps little known change to the difficulty retargeting mechanism that is already set to happen. Starting at block 208440, difficulty will be retargeted every 15 blocks instead of every 1440 blocks. The block target will remain the same at one minute. You do not need to update anything to implement this retarget change. It is built into the current clients and will happen automatically across the network starting at block 208440. FYI you can find this in the source code here https://github.com/solarcoin/solarcoin/blob/master/src/main.cpp#L846.

15 minute retargeting will not completely solve the multipool / large miner issues we have been seeing lately, but it will certainly reduce the period of time we are stuck at high difficulty and perhaps make make it more unreasonable for whoever is throttling the network at low difficulty to continue this practice, considering the difficulty will change much more frequently.