Quote from: jjjordan on August 31, 2017, 02:20:09 PM

Hey georgem,

I am not a coder, but what happens when network hashrate drops from 36GH/s to 500MH/s?
Will it take days/weeks etc for the difficulty to go back to normal? Assuming that was the normal network hashrate before helium was announced?

Just curious...

It depends how quickly this happens.
If the hashrate drop happens from one second to the other, than indeed we will see a blocktime length increase that is similar in percentage as the drop factor expressed in Hash/s.
If the drop happens smoothly during 24-48 hours or so, then the difficulty will adjust pretty much on-the-fly.

Assuming an immediate drop as you describe, which is a drop to ca 2% of hashrate, this would mean that blocks will initially take 50 times longer, so we would see 1 hour blocks for a while.
The good thing is that spreadcoin adjusts difficulty with every new block, so difficulty readjustment starts immediately, but it will take a few hundred blocks for the average difficulty to normalize back to 1 min blocks.

So we might see a week or so of slower blocks that take a long time to mine, but that's the worst case.

I expect the drop in hashrate to happen in stages. Fast stages, but stages nonetheless.