Quote from: Pietjebel on April 27, 2015, 07:41:11 PM

I have a question complementing this thread.
I have copied a chunk from the whitepaper:

Quote

The average work required is exponential in the number
of zero bits required and can be verified by executing a single hash.
For our timestamp network, we implement the proof-of-work by incrementing a nonce in the
block until a value is found that gives the block's hash the required zero bits

Every 2 weeks difficulty is adjusted to keep the 10 minutes avarage in place, but how can this be garanteed since adding or subtracting a nonce will change the difficulty and thus the average exponentialy.
Is there no risk the average will go from lets say 8 minutes to 16 minutes ?

I think I understand your question as "how can they always target 10, since adding or removing a requirement for a zero moves the difficulty target exponentially". I would also like to know the answer to this, but to clarify the quote from the whitepaper, the nonce they're incrementing is just a value added to the block hash in order to make the block hash to the right number of leading zeros. They keep incrementing the nonce until they find a block hash the satisfies the difficulty requirments. But the "nonce" is not the same thing as the leading zeros themselves. I await an answer to your actual question from someone smarter than me