Why has the difficulty stayed so high? The network has rate is pretty low. Based on 1 minute blocks we should be near block 65,500 and are only on 54,204 as of this post.
We are getting an excessive amount of hashing power from the coinchoose/coinwarz crowd after a retarget.
It took us close to 400MH/s yesterday and over 400MH/s today with spikes over 1GH/s! It's like an 10x increase from the baseline hashing power of the network.
On the other hand one can still get a decent amount of coins during the time of high difficulty because the effective hash rate is quite low during these times.
The algorithm for the hashrate calculation takes an average over many blocks. So it's always a slow up and down.
The retarget times are still around 24 hours, that is still acceptable in this situation, imo.
An effective way to fight the flash mining crowd is the keep the hashing rate high during the time of high difficulty.
This then decreases the relative amount of coins the flash miners can get and thus the attractiveness of flash mining the coin.
Titan
