Quote from: 8bitPunk on July 09, 2013, 04:33:13 AM

Quote from: Luke-Jr on July 09, 2013, 04:14:22 AM

Quote from: 8bitPunk on July 09, 2013, 04:09:42 AM

Block spacing appears to be steady in a range of 30-40 seconds, the increases in difficulty are keeping it in this range for now. However, if an optimized miner with a large improvement in prime generation speed was released (ahem luke-jr's BFGminer) then I would expect to see a block spacing of ~10 seconds and the difficulty would take days to catch up.

Too bad nobody is doing altcoin releases sensibly in this area.
There should be a minimum difficulty set high enough that it doesn't go through a rush like this.
Bitcoin didn't break difficulty 1 for months (if not longer).

True, on the other hand if Sunny had released the default client with a difficulty of 8 then blocks would have been spaced >60 seconds and difficulty would have adjusted slowly downwards. Based on his benchmarking before release he must have been happy that 7 was the right place to start.

There's also the fact that he'd need to take into consideration whether someone of questionable morals was going to release a miner that mines 10x or 100x what he expected. How can that be predicted, andeven if it could be predicted, how could the timing of it be predicted? It's just not practical. Out of the many releases, this was a good one.