Quote from: bcp19 on August 08, 2013, 01:24:04 AM

Quote from: Dsfyu on August 08, 2013, 12:17:18 AM

Quote from: gigawatt on August 07, 2013, 09:42:25 PM

Well, block payments just dropped below 11 and difficulty passed 9.54

It's amazing how much a software update and better parameters can get you.
On that note, I'm starting to think the chains/day measurement is becoming less accurate. Either that or I've been quite unlucky.

It seems to not be accurate for me - I haven't gotten any blocks since the 25th (other than an orphan on the 25th) on my desktop though so I feel it's hard to tell. Then again my sister got three blocks on saturday with the same cpu... It seems like it's a rough average that was accurate when it was added but is slowly becoming less useful for judging how often you might get a block from my experiences.

One major misconception on this coin is people think it acts like any other coin out there... in one way it does, but for the most part it doesn't. Bitcoin, Litecoin, etc, all use a hash. Since the hash needed is random, it takes time to find. This is the only area where primecoin is like the others, in that it is a random chance to get the right variable to find a prime. Where primecoin diverges is that it can never reuse a number already found. Bitcoin and Namecoin can use the same hash and be 'merged mined', primecoin alone can never be merge mined.

The basis behind blocks is finding Cunningham Chains of length N where N is the difficulty rating. What does this mean? The smallest known length 9 chains are:85864769 and
857095381 (1st and 2nd kind). The proof of work on this coin is such that once a prime chain has been found, it cannot be reused. So each prime found means the one less prime that can be found. Look at the records primecoin has found in length 9 chains: 2030793138184474269420052163338592688212588454185304749794006580858788424425799 69*179#-1 is 151 digits long! In a way, the nice thing on this is that as time goes by and the length of these primes gets up into the 1000+ digit range, difficulty will start coming down as they become harder to find and we'll start finding larger 8 chains and larger 7 chains.

Therefore the metric for finding blocks is ever changing, you can't count on what works today being the best thing to do in 2 weeks time as well. This is an ever changing coin and people really need to start thinking outside the box.

Prime chains are plenty. I don't think we will ever reach 1000 digit zone, not in 100 years at least.