Discrepancies in Difficulty Adjustment Days! - As early as the first few months

[BitcoinReverso]

Hi Everyone,

Its my first post in here, and surely wont be the last!

I couldn't help but notice the following:

Knowing that difficulty adjustment occurs every 2016, blocks; why are the dates of every other 2016^th block vary in date when it should have actually occurred?

https://ibb.co/WVxmspH

Thanks, and hope I can find the right people here who can help me create the first of its kind crypto currency of a nation - The Arez Coin, The currency of the Lebanese Revolution against corrupt politics!

[ranochigo]

Specifically which period?

As you said, the difficulty adjustment is done every 2016 blocks. In the earlier days of Bitcoin, there were few miners mining and they were using CPU miners which is extremely slow. The period between each block was sporadic and it took much longer than 2 weeks to reach 2016 blocks. The first difficulty adjustment was in February 2010.

Since the lowest difficulty was 1, the difficulty(target) couldn't have adjusted to get the block interval to 10 minutes and thus it persisted for quite a while.

[BitcoinReverso]

Specifically which period?

As you said, the difficulty adjustment is done every 2016 blocks. In the earlier days of Bitcoin, there were few miners mining and they were using CPU miners which is extremely slow. The period between each block was sporadic and it took much longer than 2 weeks to reach 2016 blocks. The first difficulty adjustment was in February 2010.

Since the lowest difficulty was 1, the difficulty(target) couldn't have adjusted to get the block interval to 10 minutes and thus it persisted for quite a while.

Please refer to blockchain link below , regarding when block # 2016 was mined! https://www.blockchain.com/btc/block/2016

[pooya87]

Mining (aka finding a hash lower than the difficulty target) is partially a chance based operation. You can find the hash in a second or it could take hours more than usual. So even with a fixed hashrate you can end up finding x number of blocks in different time frames, eg. 15 days to find first 2016 blocks and 13 days to find second 2016 blocks.

When the hashrate is so much less than the difficulty, it can take significantly longer. The minimum difficulty can't go below 1 and it is possible that in early weeks there were more miners compared to following weeks hence the 4, 10 days in the beginning followed by 20-30 days in the next periods. It is also possible that miner(s) (Satoshi et al) shut down their computer for some time, maybe to upgrade to new version, test some change, etc. hence increasing the time between blocks.