What's the reason it is only 9?
I'm trying to get my head around the idea that Quarkcoin launched a few hours ago and is already 57 difficultly.*

Is that an apples to oranges comparison? Surely Quarkcoin can't have 6 times the network strength of Primecoin.

As Primecoin difficulty rises, the supply of coins really gets choked off - at difficultly of 32 . . . that's 999/(32*32)= .975 coins per block.

*Oh, it's gone up to 63 since I wrote those two sentences.