I've been mining for about a month now, so I am still very new.
For two weeks, I've been mining SUMO on Fairpool. I'm quite happy with the pool, at least in my limited knowledge and experience, I think I am happy.
However, I've noticed the difficulty takes HUGE swings every day. I'm not talking about the difficulty that I see on my end, but rather the total mining difficulty. As an example, here is what I see currently on sumo.fairpool.cloud which has real time stats available.
Current block 95 005 difficulty is 11,064,293,607 ~ 39.84 MH/s
'normal' difficulty seems to be around 6-8,000,000,000 at a 20-25MH/s speed
However, every single day I notice the total hash rate (for all mining on the coin in total as I understand it as the fairpool hash is 4-5MH/s generally) suddenly jumping by huge amounts. As an example right now, it has almost DOUBLED from where it was an hour ago. Of course this makes the difficulty jump up.
My question is, what causes this? Is this a result of some huge mining farm owner running a miner that automatically jumps from coin to coin based on what is currently most profit? It seems this super high difficulty will last for an hour, two, maybe 6 hours and then total MH/s will drop back down to 'normal levels' of 25MH/s or so.
I have read that cryptonight do have this auto scaling difficulty to prevent 'raids' on it's system? is that the right words?
This is how I've interpreted what is happening. Could someone add more to this ?
Thank you.