Cerulean Spark (ceruleanspark)'s status on Saturday, 15-Mar-14 13:44:12 UTC
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@pony The effect of difficulty is supposed to be to balance increases in the network hashrate in order to keep the actual monetary value of the output stable. Difficulty does not increase linearly, as a lot of the calculators assume, but actually increases (and decreases) in proportion to the total hashrate of the entire bitcoin network. This leads to a sine-wave like pattern as difficulty spikes, those who can swap to other currencies, dropping the overall hashrate, causing the difficulty to retarget and drop again, which leads to people switching back to BTC and so on and so forth. A number of alt-coins have implemented various tweaks to their algorithms to specifically prevent this pattern of behaviour, with Doge being the post recent to install it.
