I'm really interested in finding what the relationship is between difficulty and the total size of the burstcoin mining network. As an analogy, the bitcoin mining network knows that they have an approximate hash rate of 200 petahash right now. It would be interesting and useful to know the total number of bytes dedicated to mining BURST. This would allow miners to more accurately predict their earnings, and it would also allow the entire community to know the economic cost of mounting a 51% attack.
I asked the dev about this, and they said:
A scaling factor is used and adjusted based on recent block times to attempt to get 4min/block. The difficulty used internally is (2^64)/scaling_factor. What is displayed in nrs info is cumulative difficulty(block 1 dif + block 2 dif + ... + block n dif).
A general difficulty -> TB amount could likely be found but I don't know it.
So, this confirms that the difficulty figure is arbitrary, and not directly related to the number of bytes in the network. However, since it self-adjusts for a 4-minute block time, I believe there should be a linear relationship between the average difficulty and the number of bytes in the burstcoin mining network.
Current estimates (based on my own findings and what others have been saying) indicate that 1 TB will mine about 2000 BURST per day. Based on this, the total number of bytes mining burst is approximately 1800 TB, which equals 1.8 x 10^15 bytes.
Currently, the difficulty is 2182485975211560, and the block height is 6246. This makes the average difficulty equal to 3.49 x 10^11.
Based on these figures, and the assumption that there is a linear relationship between average difficulty and total bytes mining, the formula for figuring out the total number of bytes mining is:
(cumulative_difficulty / block_height) * 5151 = number of bytes on the burstcoin mining network
Using this formula with current figures, we get a network size of 2182485975211560 / 6246 * 5151 = 1.8 x 10^15 bytes.
I'd love to work to improve on this formula! Any feedback is welcome.
you can see detailed block info at
http://burst.cryptoport.io
on block 6250, Base Target = 16086365
if burst scaling factor is equal to Nxt Base target,
then we assume that this number is the scaling factor dev said,
and its look correct because overtime this number is reducing
based on dev said difficulty calculation is 2^64/scaling_factor
so on block 6250,
difficulty is 2^64/16086365 = 1.1467317 x 10^12
this number is total nonce required to solve a block
since 1 nonce is equal to 256KB = 0.25 MB
we can convert this nonce count into MB by
1.1467317 x 10^12 x 0.25 = 286,682,915,527 MB
= 279963784.7 GB
= 273402.1 TB
so it need 266 Peta Bytes to solve every block, that is your plot always resulting deadline of < 1 seconds
since blocktime is adjusted to 240 secs, minimal data required is
273402.1 TB / 240 = 1139 TB
assuming we have 1 TB, your chance to found a block is one every 1139 blocks
which is equal to 1139 x 240 = 273360 seconds
= 3.16 days
conclusion :
you will get 1 block every 3 days on 1 TB plots
i dont know if my calculations are correct, but its close, i have 15 TB, and the average i found a block is close to 0.33 block / days / TB
