Quote from: knightmb on July 16, 2010, 05:33:57 PM

Quote from: satoshi on July 16, 2010, 05:29:28 PM

Yes, about 20 hours. (120 conf / 6 blocks per hour = 20 hours) That's the normal length of time before you can spend it. You'll know long before that that you won one.

So if the difficulty was increased so high that it took a day to find a winning block, that means the lucky winner would have to wait 120 day before they could spend it or about 4 months if everyone else was averaging about the same speed? Seems like at the high end of the difficulty, there is an issue with coin generation vs. being able to put it into circulation by spending. Wouldn't the long delay cause a lot of generated coin to be lost because anything could happen to the PC that won in a long amount of time if the winner had to really wait that long? They might un-install the program or the computer get eaten by a virus or power surge well before then.

I think that the overall network is generating the same amount of blocks regardless of the difficulty; the difficulty is intended so that the network generates a block in a relatively constant amount of time. Therefore, this confirmation time should always be around the same.

Satoshi or anyone else can correct me if I'm wrong