I just spoke with richie over at bittrex, we had a fair amount of orphan blocks come through earlier, so in the interest of safety, he froze the wallet until we could speak and take a better look at it.. looks like the huge peaks in hashpower and our 1 block difficulty retarget could have been the culprit, or someone trying to solo mine with our old doged protocol (60016) from back in 2014, however nothing was harmed and no coins lost. All they can do is create orphan blocks, it doesn't pose a risk to us or our blockchain. orphan blocks are completely normal, we just dont normally see that many in a row. Keep in mind pausing a wallet is something that exchanges do as preventative measure, to ensure the safety of their customers. Please don't get mad at Bittrex for being concerned about the users coins! If i ran an exchange, I would also pause the wallet until i could figure out what was happening, and why.
Great response, Dev. Is it the same issue with C-CEX or what's going on there? Also, I seem to remember you talked about wanting to average out the difficulty retarget to a longer time a while ago, is this plan still in the works?
yeah a longer retarget time is in the works. right now, the 1 block retarget serves to discourage multipools from mining and dumping, since they add so much hashpower (sometimes double or triple the current network hashrate). we make them work very hard to get the next block. this blockchain behavior makes them lose interest and leave the network, otherwise they'd just stay on and dump all the coins they get.