Quote from: Bitcoiner on July 16, 2010, 02:48:54 PM
Quote from: satoshi on July 16, 2010, 02:46:12 PM
The proof-of-work difficulty is currently 45.38. (see http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.php)
It’s about to increase again in a few hours. It’s only been 3-4 days since the last increase, so I expect it will increase by the max of 4 times, or very nearly the max. That would put it at 181.54.
The target time between adjustments is 14 days, 14/3.5 days = 4.0 times increase.
Holy…
Satoshi, what happens if the rush dries up for a bit; some of the slashdotters or whoever get tired? Does the difficulty ever go back down?
If I’m reading the source code correctly, it should go up and down based on how much CPU is being thrown at it. So if someone rented a super computer to drive up the difficulty for a week, then it vanished, the difficulty should float back down.