Ok guys lets give it to you straight...
The retargeting is wrong... we've gotten together discussed it on IRC and are organising to take care of it.
We have said that we were going to issue two hardforks from the start which is fortunate, it means that we can fix it quickly, and we'll do an official announcement explaining what exactly went wrong.. Unfortunately we are moving our planned next mandatory client release forward to next week end so you'll have to upgrade again.. we are looking to make it so you'll have two weeks to upgrade.
The basic problem is we should be popping blocks every 60 seconds with a 30 block retarget. Instead we are on 30 second blocks with a 60 block difficulty retarget.. We are all mining at double rewards.
As embarrassing as it is, we've always played it straight, believing that honesty is the best policy, so we admit that we screwed up.
And we've decided that the thirty second blocks give us a competitive edge, the 60 second block retarget still gives us half hourly retargets so.. We are keeping them..
We will reduce the the rewards for blocks by half, and change the block halving to suit..
We know how incompetant this makes us look, but we are willing to wear the blame, and the damage is that miners will be getting more coins for about the next three weeks, and the price will probably drop due to the higher amount of coins hitting the exchanges.. Hopefully it will rebound at the next hardfork.
We know that this is a pain in the ass, but this should be the last mandatory update we need to issue, and the community knew we were doing another one so hopefully it will proceed smoothly.
add a poison pill for sudden hash increases