4 ms·

So does that mean the network is now demanding each ether be mined every 12 seconds (20% harder statistic mentioned in the linked article), or the difficulty ha

So does that mean the network is now demanding each ether be mined every 12 seconds (20% harder statistic mentioned in the linked article), or the difficulty has increased naturally? E.g. there has been a large spike in the number of ether miners lately, which has caused the network to naturally readjust the difficulty to maintain the 15s/ether mining rate? If so, these GPU miners leaving the field would readjust the difficulty back again towards the original levels, or is this difficulty change a more permanent thing due to some underlying change in the technology?

benchaney 9y ago
> So does that mean the network is now demanding each ether be mined every 12 seconds You have it backwards. A 20% increase in difficulty would mean that a block was only being mined once every 18s. The intuition is that if there are fewer blocks, then it is harder to get one. I think this change is due to the etherium difficulty bomb: https://www.google.com/amp/s/themerkle.com/what-is-the-ethereum-difficulty-bomb/amp/ https://www.google.com/amp/s/themerkle.com/what-is-the-ether...