Part of the answer is that the last block (114451) took over an hour to solve.
I have been noticing that as soon as the difficulty gets around 145000 or higher it gets very difficult to solve a block and it seems out of proportion to what I would expect. It also takes long time for the difficulty to adjust down. I assume because the time between blocks is too long. No one is going to make any money if the coin can't be mined.
Can the devs investigate this?
EDIT: the net hash rate dropped to 5.88 once the block was found. So much for conspiracy theories....
I have been noticing that as soon as the difficulty gets around 145000 or higher it gets very difficult to solve a block and it seems out of proportion to what I would expect. It also takes long time for the difficulty to adjust down. I assume because the time between blocks is too long. No one is going to make any money if the coin can't be mined.
Can the devs investigate this?
EDIT: the net hash rate dropped to 5.88 once the block was found. So much for conspiracy theories....
I wondered about this also. I had some conversations at Consensus before the Zen launch announcement party that were enlightening. There were some investors who wanted to get Zclassic before the split. They were working to buy large amounts of Zclassic but couldn't without driving the price up too high on Bittrex. They could not find any private party willing to sell. So they hired some miners to get them as much as they could get.
Something similar might be happening now. There was no Zen ICO, no pre-allocation of large amounts of cryptocurrency like Ethereum, no 20% carve-out of mining that gets paid directly to the venture capital investors in the project like in Zcash. The only way to get Zen is to mine it. The 79% of hash rate that can't be found is, in my best guess, hired hashrate from different investors who want to be able to get into a new cryptocurrency and are doing it the only way they can right now, which is mining it. They run their private pools or proxy servers for solo mining, and don't worry about attracting retail level miners, because they don't need to.
Those GPU's that are sold out? Probably going to the big private mining farms that have been buying in large quantity for years. Good, longtime, consistent customers with lots of future purchasing ability always get the best allocations of restricted product.
How does that affect retail level miners? It's good! Where there is broadbased demand, that's good news for a cryptocurrency.
And I really admire people like @ocminer who are willing to build and expand mining pools for all sorts of cryptocurrencies. I would not be able to deal with the amount of crap he gets on a daily basis from people who use his pools for mining and making money, and complain and accuse him of not being fair.
