I'm just jumping in with my naive opinion, so please criticize as necessary.
Why not reference difficulty in terms of number of leading zeroes for the target hash?
For instance "our difficulty level is at 14 leading zeroes of precision"
I realize that the jump from each zero to the next is not linear, but wouldn't it be useful for describing "epochs" of difficulty?
Topic: why difficulty not in bits (Read 723 times)
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Anyway rather than post hello and following up to myself 5x I thought I'd say something that was on my mind as irritating about the bitcoin wiki explanation of various things. I can always re-post it later on.
I hope you get a chance to post that question here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=6.0
I'm afraid you won't get an answer from Satoshi
But I'd be curious what Gavin, Jeff Garzik, etc say.why is difficulty not expressed in bits?
Naive question: Wouldn't that mean that difficulty can only be halved or doubled at a time? That's bit of a problem.
Maybe they could be expressed in 1/n2 bits. That wouldn't make it any more comprehensible of course, but would help with the problem of difficulty adjustments getting more precise as difficulty increases.
(btw, mods can move newbie discussions to proper forums on demand)
I think the newbie area is the wrong place to post that
Indeed and being the person who invented the bitcoin mining function I was mildly irritated to be dumped in a newbie section. I was enjoying USENET flame wars and newbie jokes probably before the average participant of this forum was born
(No slight to other internet-time geriatrics like myself on here).Anyway rather than post hello and following up to myself 5x I thought I'd say something that was on my mind as irritating about the bitcoin wiki explanation of various things. I can always re-post it later on.
Adam
ps thanks for the op for another reply
Well, difficulty is a real number, its not a referance number
I fully agree that we need a more "human interpretable" form of a difficulty stat, Telling someone that the difficulty is 7,673,000 and that its going to rise up around by 1-2million more Really doesnt mean much to them, its just confusing to hear that "a bitcoin is now 7673000x harder to get than it was when it was first released" it really doesnt tell us much.
I fully agree that we need a more "human interpretable" form of a difficulty stat, Telling someone that the difficulty is 7,673,000 and that its going to rise up around by 1-2million more Really doesnt mean much to them, its just confusing to hear that "a bitcoin is now 7673000x harder to get than it was when it was first released" it really doesnt tell us much.
Right thats approximately meaningless. Now the original or minimal difficulty is 2^32 so 7,673,000 x 2^32 is approx 2^55. How easy is that in comparison because 7,673,000 ~ 2^23. (I guess I must've mistranslated it before 55 not 52 bits)
And when you see a bitcoin in hex (like with hashcash because that is what the coin is) you can visually *see* those 55 bits. This is the latest hash from the block explorer:
http://blockexplorer.com/block/00000000000000e3d3268e05a9901759c1452590d0838a80aeb8abaea59f1e9f
and bingo I can count 0s (14 of them) multiply by 4 (bits per hex nibble) and I know that is a 56bit hashcash collision. (You get lucky and an extra 1 bit half the time, 2 bits 1/2 time etc).
Adam
Well, difficulty is a real number, its not a referance number
I fully agree that we need a more "human interpretable" form of a difficulty stat, Telling someone that the difficulty is 7,673,000 and that its going to rise up around by 1-2million more Really doesnt mean much to them, its just confusing to hear that "a bitcoin is now 7673000x harder to get than it was when it was first released" it really doesnt tell us much.
I fully agree that we need a more "human interpretable" form of a difficulty stat, Telling someone that the difficulty is 7,673,000 and that its going to rise up around by 1-2million more Really doesnt mean much to them, its just confusing to hear that "a bitcoin is now 7673000x harder to get than it was when it was first released" it really doesnt tell us much.
Newbies are restricted to this section only 
I think the newbie area is the wrong place to post that
Hi
Digging myself out of the newbie jail. But a real question - why is difficulty not expressed in bits?
With hashcash I always used eg 20bits. I think bitcoin is currently at 52. As bitcoin mining is hashcash mining plus an extension to allow fractional bits (rather than to find k 0 bits, to find a number < 2^k where can be fractional).
But its hard to be 100% certain if I even correctly converted that because this page is unnecessarily complex for a very simple actual problem: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
and bits are very easy to read. If one looks at the hash output in hex just multiply the leading 0s by 4 (and the next nibble figure out if it is >7 = 4 bits, > 3 = 3 bits, > 1 = 2 bits and 1 = 1 bit (and obviously 0 would be another leading 0). QED trivial, human comprehensible difficulty that can be handchecked. That was part of the design aim for hashcash to simplify the computational, programming and human verification.
Adam
Digging myself out of the newbie jail. But a real question - why is difficulty not expressed in bits?
With hashcash I always used eg 20bits. I think bitcoin is currently at 52. As bitcoin mining is hashcash mining plus an extension to allow fractional bits (rather than to find k 0 bits, to find a number < 2^k where can be fractional).
But its hard to be 100% certain if I even correctly converted that because this page is unnecessarily complex for a very simple actual problem: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Difficulty
and bits are very easy to read. If one looks at the hash output in hex just multiply the leading 0s by 4 (and the next nibble figure out if it is >7 = 4 bits, > 3 = 3 bits, > 1 = 2 bits and 1 = 1 bit (and obviously 0 would be another leading 0). QED trivial, human comprehensible difficulty that can be handchecked. That was part of the design aim for hashcash to simplify the computational, programming and human verification.
Adam
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