Ah, I see. Cool.
Yes, I had another look - it does always start running again, sure. And then left-over transactions do get processed.
The coin is really fully functional - just "stuttering". It is suddenly very fast, and then in a regular rhythm very very slow. (Still - much faster than a standard fiat bank - they need not hours but days for a tx
)
The blockchain doesn't even get much bloated probably - because the slow blocks recreate the average of "3:42 minute block targets" ( = 420 blocks per day) ? Another non-existing problem, good.
Still, I was getting more and more fascinated. Irregularities are more interesting than smooth boredom :-) All this is purely empirical, I haven't taken the time to look into the KGW code yet. I just did some preliminary data analysis - What else could I find out? -->
The difficulty adjustment algo seems to have a strange pathology that it very suddenly increases the difficulty by a huge factor, from one block to the next one. (for an example, have a look at blocks 252656 and 252657 here
http://abe.darkgamex.ch:2751/chain/Anoncoin?count=12&hi=252662). And it is such a strong jump that when the miners are leaving (and every clever miner should leave when there is suddenly a difficulty a hundred times higher) ... then it suddenly takes many hours, even half a day, for the next blocks. That slowness brings the average block time back on track. And 2 or 3 blocks later, it's running fast like mad again. Rinse repeat.
As the programmers very very probably did not intend it to be like that
it looks to me as if the difficulty adjustment algo is getting gamed somehow. Different from, but comparable to an instamine. It happens regularly.
I call those 2-3 blocks 'difficulty-walls' for now - they can be higher than 6000, while the bottom in between can be as low as difficulty 25.
Right now we are on block 253261, the last 'difficulty-wall' was at 253140, the ones before at 253019, and 252898, and 252777, and 252657, before that at block 252534 ... - so the distances are 121, 121, 121, 121 blocks, 120 blocks, 123 blocks, etc ...
http://abe.darkgamex.ch:2751/chain/Anoncoin?count=1000 Then the two or three SLOW blocks take 2 - 8 hours, usually.
The total time for the ~120 FAST blocks between two such difficulty walls has been 6 - 33 minutes.
That's the time in which 600 ANC can be mined in one go - with little effort. One block every 3-16 seconds, worth 5 ANC.
Interesting phenomena. And still 20 full days time until November ... make me think now: Why leave all that wealth flow into the pockets of that perhaps only one guy? He would get 5 * (1440/3.42) * 119/122 ~ 2000 ANC per day, which -dumped at the current price- could mean almost 50000 dollars until then. Not much compared to the market cap of a million dollars, actually. (Perhaps that is the reason that this is not even perceived as a huge problem here? - which I found really odd when I encountered this first.)
Still, is there anything that could be done about it? First I thought: What if I rent a few rigs now, in order to catch some of that seemingly-easy-to-harvest wealth ... BUT I need to be there in those few minutes, when all those ~120 blocks are generated, at ridiculously low diff. And then as soon as there is a difficulty-wall, while those 1-3 blocks with a 20 - 150 higher difficulty are mined (which takes 2 - 10 hours, seemingly) ... I have to stay away, and simply mine something else. Where can I find such an algorithm? Do I really need a special sgminer variant? Or can I just use cgwatcher to switch? But if I rent rigs, I could not use cgwatcher, only choose the pool - so do you know WHICH pool provides such cleverness? ... BUT then of course, the categorical imperative of Immanuel Kant comes to mind ... What would happen if more people used such an algorithm now?
... very probably those difficulty walls would become even higher, right? -->
I decided to have a longer look at the time series. The peaks already seem to get higher indeed!
The first plot shows the past 10000 blocks. 
19/09/2014 00:41 - 10/10/2014 19:31 = 21.78 days
--> 3:08 minutes per block on average, that's pretty close to the targeted 3:42 minutes.
Actually: When did the raping appear first? I only looked at the past few thousand blocks.
Conjecture: The recent (re)appearance simply comes from the price surge. While the price was below approx 0.002 BTC/ANC, the problem always went away again - probably other coins were simply more profitable for that clever rapist (Isn't there a more neutral term? Essentially he is simply harvesting money ... in a way that the source code of this coin
allows.). But then on October 6h, everyone went nuts about ANC
https://cryptrader.com/charts/cryptsy/anc/btc and since October 7th, the stuttering hasn't stopped anymore.
The
second plot zooms into the recent past, the last 11 difficulty-walls, within the last 1212 blocks. 
08/10/2014 15:01 - 10/10/2014 19:31 = 2.19 days
--> 2:36 minutes average block time, only 30% too fast. Not a big deal. N.B.: The x-axis is not proportional to date, but to block number - you can easily see the regular 121 block frequency. While ANC is getting raped, it is 'breathing' with a base frequency of about 10 / ( 2.19 * 24*60*60) = 0.00005 Hertz, and with very fast breath of about 0.3 Hz during those 119 highly profitable blocks. What a stuttering. Here are examples for the 119 fast blocks:
At least no one is getting any coins into exchanges to dump!!
The bright side of very high diff raping situation, lol...
Well I was wrong about that I guess, those dumps are insane.
Yes, because the leftover 7 - 47 transactions are then simply processed in the fast phases.
Speculation: The dumps might actually also happen exactly in those intervals? You can check the times of the dumps yourself, I wouldn't be surprised if they always happen shortly after a fast blocks phase. There have been precicsely 4 dumps in the time span where there were 4 low-diff runs with 600 ANC each. But hey - that is speculation.
Welcome to Anoncoin!
Thanks a lot.
And thank you strange coin, for these pleasurable nerdy hours, analyzing your unique heartbeat ...
Send me
BTC 1NceECxBgg5E7si8gJwinuBcBhpZTn5889 or
[ANC] Aa96FUJyZXXZN2AhPtGbbAUsM7Nsxd1xhU
If this analysis helps you to make money (or avoid
to loose money) - or if you simply enjoyed this,
then send me some coins please. Thanks.
EDIT: I started
here and
here, actually.
Is it possible the dev team is part of the secret mining group getting rich from the difficulty issue? Just a crazy theory but that may explain why they have taken so long to fix the problem
