Quote from: DannyHamilton on April 27, 2015, 08:39:14 PM

Quote from: tspacepilot on April 27, 2015, 08:18:08 PM

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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,
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We don't just add or remove a zero.

Adding or removing a zero was an example in a concept document about how a difficulty could be adjusted. It does not describe how the difficulty adjustment was actually implemented once the software was written.

Instead, the difficulty target is simply a 256 bit number. Any hash value that is less than the target is valid regardless of how many zeros there are.

Now in practice, a number that is less than the target will never have LESS leading zeros than the target has, but it might have the exact same number of zeros if the rest of the hash is less than the target difficulty.

I think that pretty much explains it. Thanks Danny Hamilton!