Quote from: ranochigo on August 10, 2017, 11:55:02 AM

Quote from: nathan_24 on August 10, 2017, 11:37:18 AM

You say that difficulty can't go lower than that because of the algorithm, but it is much lower in the testnet, for example.

Is there a hard-coded minimum difficulty then?

Testnet does have a minimum difficulty of 1 though it is not equivalent to the difficulty on the mainnet.

Yes, the lowest possible target is hardcoded into the client.[1]

[1] https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/1b046603b30ebfab6199a2f92015d507b248b590/src/pow.cpp#L82

That's it! I could read in the code that the minimum difficulty target is 0x00000000ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff. That is transformed into 486604799 when compressed. Then that's why the difficulty never went lower, even when the blocks were produced slower than 2,016 blocks per 2 weeks.

Thanks!