What determines mining difficulty?

[JohnnyPierce]

A question that I never understood is what exactly determines mining difficulty, more so like in altcoin mining like all these new coins that have been appearing, some of them have, every now and again huge leaps in difficulty and then they go back to a lower one after some time.

My question is, what exactly determines this temporary rise in difficulty?

The rise in difficulty has anything to do with market capitalization? If someone were to invest, let's sat, 100 million dollars in a recent, newly created coin, would that have any consequence on the mining difficulty of that same coin, or investnment in a coin only dictates its potential value in dollars and difficulty is only a purely internal parameter of the coins programming?

[Sonny]

The rise in difficulty has anything to do with market capitalization?

No.

My question is, what exactly determines this temporary rise in difficulty?

For bitcoin, difficulty adjusts itself every 2016 blocks.
The bitcoin client compares the total time used in finding the past 2016 blocks with the expected time (2 weeks), and adjusts the difficulty accordingly.

[JohnnyPierce]

The rise in difficulty has anything to do with market capitalization?

No.

My question is, what exactly determines this temporary rise in difficulty?

For bitcoin, difficulty adjusts itself every 2016 blocks.
The bitcoin client compares the total time used in finding the past 2016 blocks with the expected time (2 weeks), and adjusts the difficulty accordingly.

What about altcoins?

I've been mining FedoraCoin (Tips) and the difficulty is always jumping from as low as 50 to as high as 200. And it does this seemingly randomly, why? And what is the underlying cause?

[ymer]

The rise in difficulty has anything to do with market capitalization?

No.

My question is, what exactly determines this temporary rise in difficulty?

For bitcoin, difficulty adjusts itself every 2016 blocks.
The bitcoin client compares the total time used in finding the past 2016 blocks with the expected time (2 weeks), and adjusts the difficulty accordingly.

What about altcoins?

I've been mining FedoraCoin (Tips) and the difficulty is always jumping from as low as 50 to as high as 200. And it does this seemingly randomly, why? And what is the underlying cause?

Each coin can be customized to a block target (avg time to get a block) and difficulty retarget.

[Sonny]

What about altcoins?

I've been mining FedoraCoin (Tips) and the difficulty is always jumping from as low as 50 to as high as 200. And it does this seemingly randomly, why? And what is the underlying cause?

I just did a search for you and found the announcement thread of your coin.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=380466.0

Specifications:
Block Time: 60 Seconds
Difficulty Retarget Time: 10 minutes

So, your coin will adjust the difficulty every 10 blocks (10min / 60s = 10).
If the past 10 blocks were found in less than 10 minutes, the difficulty will up, and vice versa.

[sgbitcoinsg]

Its possible some miners pull out from mining that coin, so to achieve the target block time, the difficulty readjusts.