Hi guys, here is the Blocktime calculation breakdown:
The blocktime is dependent on the difficulty. The difficulty in Verium is an automatically adjusting exponential factor that is dependent on the difference between the actual blocktime and the targeted blocktime. So as computational power grows the blocktime speeds up and the difficulty adjusts exponentially to match the computational power to the target blocktime. In Verium however, the target blocktime is also changing, so this ends up smoothing the effective difficulty. The difficulty and the variable blocktime are a counterbalance to one another, resulting in a more organic, smooth and incremental difficulty adjustment as the computational power grows. This can greatly extend the profitability of CPU mining combined with the reward adjustment scheme. Additionally this can potentially decrease incentive for pooling, because solo-mining can be more profitable and result in a more predictable return on time devoted to solo-mining.
Another key factor is the security enhancement of this variable blocktime paradigm. Any competing chain that has less computational power will calculate a slower blocktime for it's chain, this results in nodes reconnecting automatically to the chain with the largest block height, which will always have the most computational power and fastest calculated blocktime. So there is no risk that the longer chain has less power and the computational power consensus is always maintained in totality.
The blocktime calculation is logarithmic so to better intuit how this works, I've plotted it both linearly and logarithmically. As you can see, as the consensus is getting off the ground it quickly speeds up and dampens difficulty, but dampens it only as the security is acceptable for such an effect. It can also slow in the case of a reduced computational power.
The blocktime is calculated with this equation:
blocktime (sec) = -13.03*log(difficulty)+180