x-post from slack
Q. "How high will the mining difficulty be at the beginning?"
What a great question.
Bitcoin block 1 was mined 6 days after block 0, the genesis block.
https://blockchain.info/block/000000000019d6689c085ae165831e934ff763ae46a2a6c172b3f1b60a8ce26fhttps://blockchain.info/block/00000000839a8e6886ab5951d76f411475428afc90947ee320161bbf18eb6048Blockchains take a while to come to life, in the case of Bitcoin roughly a week. If there are too many people mining immediately, the network will get into difficulty as the chain is too new and many forks will appear. It has the potential to be a bit of a mess.
This is why we'll keep everyone off the network for a while during which time we'll bring up the difficulty, which is effectively establishing a stable 'longest chain' for everyone to follow.
A while could be 1 week, 2 weeks, possibly 3 weeks. We'll determine when we think its reasonably safe, but with ASICS the start might be a difficult time (no pun intended). You'll get frustrated as hell during this period. Please feel free to take out your frustrations on me and no one else, as everyone else in the team will be working hard to try to get the network stable.
We wont profit from the rewards we'll earn during the closed mining period. We'll probably burn those coins.
We are expecting 2 pools to be up by the time you all get on the network.