So, we had our first auto-adjustment of proof-of-work difficulty on Dec 30, 2009. Minimum difficulty is 32 zero bits, so it ain't getting easier than that even if a single node is running. Last year, we were mostly below that minimum, but now we've surpassed it and the difficulty keeps climbing.
On Feb 4, the difficulty jumped from 1.34 times last year's to 1.82 times. This means miners are only getting 55% of the coins they used to. Crazy, right?
Another adjustment came in on Feb 14, skyrocketing the difficulty from 1.82 to 2.53, a whopping 39% increase in just 10 days. More nodes are joining and cranking out blocks faster than ever.
I thought I was generating less than expected at first. Turns out I was just misunderstanding the 'matures in xx more blocks' thing. Still, a major jump in difficulty is gonna be a headache.
My rig is a modern core 2 duo and it takes me around 20 hours to mine ฿50. Older machines? Forget it, it would take forever. Why can't we make the generation more divisible, like getting ฿5 every 2 hours instead?
I've been feeling like I'm getting almost no Bitcoins lately. My rate of earning seems ten times slower. If I'm not online for 14 hours straight, I'm getting zilch.
Today I mined 5 blocks on my Pentium. Two came in quick succession. Sure, there’s a slowdown since the last adjustment, but I'm still getting decent coinage. You guys with issues, do you have your BitCoin port open?
Yeah, my port is wide open on both software and hardware firewalls. But I think my high latency (like 2000ms) and packet loss (up to 10%) might be the problem.
I get that, but there’s no way to do smaller increments practically. The block generation frequency needs to balance speed and latency. 6 blocks per hour is the target.
Can Satoshi confirm if your computations keep going if you disconnect? Like, is there a way to show how much progress you've made towards generating a block? That would be encouraging.
2 seconds of latency shouldn’t hurt your generation rate much, right? I think the protocol resyncs to the next message and keeps requesting missed blocks.
If I remember correctly, every Bitcoin client has the same algorithm built in. It adjusts difficulty automatically and rejects any blocks that don't match the current difficulty.
So, how does the number of CPUs connected affect this whole thing? We need Satoshi to clarify that since easier difficulty blocks get accepted sometimes.
We're discussing how someone could theoretically alter the source to make block generation way too easy and create a massive proof-of-work just to mess with the network. Is there a way to verify how much real work was done?
Generating a block can take longer than that, especially if you haven't mined before. Make sure your Bitcoin client is fully synced with enough connections.