Can someone tell me how iXcoin's difficulty is consistently much lower than devcoin's while the network hash rate is usually right up there with Devcoin's and sometimes even higher?
IXcoin's difficulty should then be as high as Devcoin's, if not even higher and that's simply not the case. I just checked Vircurex and right now ixCoin has a difficulty which is half of Devcoin's (6 PH VS 11 PH). I'm sure this will fluctuate but overall that's been the trend.
The only thing I can think of is outright manipulation to keep iXcoin's difficulty as low as possible. But to do this would mean controlling a large portion of the asics currently mining iXCoin. And this would also explain why the network hash rate for iXcoin fluctuates so immensely compared to say, NameCoin or Bitcoin.
Am I missing something here or is someone manipulating the network to mine as much iXcoin as possible and it's going undetected cause nobody really cares about this coin.
It is instructive to look at how difficulty changes over time. You can see this at
www.coinwarz.com check on SHA-256 box.
Anyway, at the bottom of the list you find NMC, IXC and DVC. You will notice that the difficulty graph looks different for each coin.
That is because the algorithm to calculate difficulty is actually different for each coin.
NMC is identical to Bitcoin. IXC has a different calculation and DVC appears to have a faster correction algorithm.
So IXC is actually different in code from Bitcoin in two main aspects (1) merge mine and (2) difficulty calculation.
