Bitmark is an interesting new coin that uses a delayed difficulty retarget that has caused crazy difficulty and hashrate swings over recent weeks, and may have also played a part in the price spike.
You can monitor the action here:
http://bitmark.co/statistics/healthProject Development:
https://trello.com/bitmarkIt's capped at a 4x swing. The difficulty now appears stable at around 35 gh/s.
If the price keeps going up - is the hast rate out there to go to 100+ gh/s? It is scrypt, I guess.
I originally advised against the delayed retarget as I thought it would make mining too difficult and discourage new miners. Appears I was wrong so far!
The lead dev's theory around the delayed retarget appears to date back to Satoshi's/NewLibertyStandard's original reasoning:
Good, our friend intelle is back, they have jumped on and off the network since day three I think.
Difficulty, revisitedSatoshi told us, and we have quoted before:
In the absence of a market to establish the price, NewLibertyStandard's estimate based on production cost is a good guess and a helpful service (thanks). The price of any commodity tends to gravitate toward the production cost. If the price is below cost, then production slows down. If the price is above cost, profit can be made by generating and selling more. At the same time, the increased production would increase the difficulty, pushing the cost of generating towards the price.
now what has happened with other currencies, is that they have changed the special formula from "If the price is below cost, then production slows down."
through short diff changes and things like kgw/dgw they have changed it to "If the price is below cost, then production cost falls"
which has killed them, or made it hard for them to survive
whereas with us we have the special formula from satoshi, on sunday I wrote, in slack:
so maybe what follows is only a temporary alignment for a day, or two max, followed by a slow/fast cycle like before going from 100-400 on diff, and double the price range of the last on market
for maybe 2 weeks
through which time volume on both could intensify, and close the large spread
so at diff 400, the network may quarter, slowing production down, giving the market a time to adjust, and making our btm more scarce, and thus more valuable
so the adjustment goes up, not down, on market - as long as we earn it
and with that, our network changes difficulty to just over 400, and we enter this phase.
Let this be a lesson to trust those before, and reinforce our decision to not change how our difficulty works.
I am curious as to the thoughts of altcoin mining community on this model.
