Somebody slammed the difficulty again a few hours ago. This is just getting stupid.
Since it's the pool I setup for just myself and a few other people to mine at occasionally that is causing this I am going to make some changes next week that will hopefully take care of it. Nobody has admitted to it so....
-Dave
Why is that stupid? Difficulty gotta rise. I skipped through the code but found no alarming spots nor suspicious lines I would feel the necessity to report. Madness is the only reason why people mine it. Only an outcast with sixty kids living below the waterline in a petroleum tank could be the archytype of a person paying attention to anything this insignificant.
The problem is that when people mine really hard really fast briefly and then leave it, the difficult is raised significantly to account for that miner. Once that miner leaves and the difficulty has been adjusted to account for their presence, it can take days to get the blockchain moving again at a steady pace because the remaining hashing power isn't enough to hash enough blocks over a short period of time to alter the difficulty to reflect the lack of the really powerful miner.