Quote from: mony68 on January 29, 2018, 09:46:17 AM

Can you imagine what will happen when N-factor 14 turns on, and even more so N-factor 15? Transactions and now hang for a few hours.
What is your answer?

I did a quick check of 100 blocks (with 3 blocks over an hour) and the average block time was just over 4 minutes. It's true that the N-factor 13 blocks can take some time to solve but I have noticed major fluctuations in hash rate lately.

The developers plan was for "Every two years the range of N-factor will increase by 1" but that has not happened yet(has been a max N-factor 13 since 2014). I haven't looked at the code to find out why or if a deeper explanation was posted here.

The white paper talks about how the higher N-factors are addressed:
https://mega.nz/#!61B2jKzS!7Tho4XLnTPawRtkdbk6SF9rvn5sNkrN1LQ6NcDEezAM

Code:

After each block is solved, AptCurve will determine how long it took for the last 10 blocks to be generated, and compare that against how long it should have taken given the expected block generation time. If it took longer, we will decrease the difficulty, and it it took shorter, we will increase the difficulty. Additionally, 4 other factors will come into play while making this decision.

1. We will look at the average of the N-factors of the previous 10 blocks. If on average they were high, the actual time is expected to be longer than if they were low, so we add an additional weight to the difficulty re-target in the down direction.
2. We look at the N-factor of the block about to be hashed. If the current block about to be hashed is a high N-factor (i.e. on the top half of N-factor range), we also add an additional weight to the difficulty re-target in the down direction.
3. We look to see if the N-factor of the block about to be hashed is the maximum N-factor value it can be, and if so, we add an additional weight in the down direction.
4. Finally, we dampen the difficulty increases by capping them in a reasonable manner to avoid wild fluctuations in the upward direction should a particular sequence of 10 blocks be hashed much quicker than expected.

The difficulty re-targeting is unique and a little bit of a pain right now with spikes in the hash rate. However, it does work it out and is still super simple for someone to open a wallet and start mining Aptcoins.