Hello,
I have some questions about alt-coins that I have never really understood. Just to make it clear, I am not planing on realeasing one but as an active miner I would like to know how everything works.
- When they say for example 1 block each 2 minutes, why when coin is released and in just a few minutes more than 1000 blocks can be mined. What is that 2 minutes block time for.
- When they say time of diff. retarget is 1 day, generally it ends up being 720 blocks (asuming 2 minutes block). Why do they say it's once per day if 720 can be mined really fast?
- About difficultu retarget, I see lots of alts having problems with it. Solution could be retarget difficulty more often I suppose, but what are the downsides of setting diff. retarget each 2 blocks for example.
Thank you!
The mining algorithm aims for 1 block every 2 minutes by adjusting the difficulty. So if it was mined faster then the difficulty goes up, slower it goes down. Because new coins start with such low difficulty lots of blocks get instamined until the difficulty catches up.
The problem some coins have is that if 20 TH/s land on it (like with multipool.us) and then leave you end up with a huge difficulty and a block time of several hours. Being able to retarget in the middle of a block would be a good solution, but difficult to implement.
Of course the best solution is a coin that keeps people interested and they don't jump onto "the next big thing".
