Diff is up again. I guess certain users think they can get an advantage by forcing it up on purpose. A user named Bitmaster1(cryptsy) or Chantha(google hangouts) is been reported to me as trying to game the Tek system in this way. Force diff up all month until he wants to stake his large wallets. He did this same thing with Hyperstake and many users could no longer stake in a reasonable amount of time, overall costing hyperstake many users in the long run.
HyperStake's difficulty is so large, that one single wallet does not have much impact on the total. Even such, HYP's rewards are not bound to difficulty, so even if he thought he was manipulating its difficulty (which he probably was not able to do) it would have worked against him anyways by making it harder for him to stake as well. HyperStake's has always been on an upward trend, and always will be. I don't think this has caused any loss of users from what I see on the richlist, most of our usual stakers are still there staking away
TEK on the other hand is extremely sensitive to difficulty fluctuations, and since its difficulty is fairly low, creating a wallet full of small outputs does not cost too much and could be gamed a bit easier. Since TEK's reward system is bound to difficulty, there is incentive to manipulate. The only way I can think of to combat this is to either collectively decide to use more outputs, or to have some type of protocol change that doesnt bind the reward to the diff.
