Quote from: kaputt on May 24, 2013, 04:27:25 PM

Quote from: MrWizard on May 24, 2013, 03:55:43 PM

Quote from: billionaire on May 24, 2013, 03:46:31 PM

What is the reasoning behind having a coin release with a sub 1 difficulty in todays day and age?

Short answer is: If you clone litecoin code with minimal changes then you have to mine the genesis block _with a CPU_ at difficulty one. That's going to potentially take a long time. Therefore you have to add code to immediately raise the difficulty at block two or shortly after. Which appears to be the case here.

How long is a long time approx.? Say, if an 8 core proc was used. I'm not looking for exact.

I really don't know what a cpu can do at mining scrypt and therefore the approx. time, but AFAIK the code can only use one cpu to mine the genesis block.