Bug in Satoshi's Target Recalculation?

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#1Feb 22, 2026, 02:20 PM
I was checking out Karpathy's Bitcoin implementation in Python, and he mentioned something interesting. He thinks the number should be 2015, not 2016. Is that correct or am I missing something?
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#2Feb 22, 2026, 06:27 PM
Seems like it might be an off by one bug. But dividing by one is a minimum variance estimator here. It's scaled by (n-1)/n, so maybe it’s the accurate measure, even if by accident.
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#3Feb 23, 2026, 12:15 AM
Not so sure it's a bug. The genesis block took ages to mine and had way higher difficulty, so they probably just skipped it in the difficulty calculation.
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j0hn.ga5Newbie
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#4Feb 23, 2026, 01:24 AM
Lol love that we’re still untangling this old code. Was Satoshi brilliant or just rushing things? Karpathy’s Python code is a good study if you wanna dive deep instead of just talking about it.
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