Did a multipool jump on this coin? In the space of a few minutes, difficulty increased more than 400 times, from 0.01833996 to 8.52404643. Roughly doubling each block. Now nothing has been found for 30 mins.
They sure did; Network hashrate is now at 1.09~ GH/s according to my pool software.
The hashrate would be based on the difficulty, right? As I mentioned above in my edit, the massive increase in difficulty does not seem to correlate with the actual time between blocks.
Expected in 3 1/2 minutes: 7
Actual in 3 1/2 minutes: 10
So a 42% overshoot... not a 46000% overshoot.
In addition, the price on Cryptsy looks fairly stable, so there wasn't a sudden change in value that would cause a multipool to jump in. So why has difficulty shot up so much?
Folks with knowledge of the KGW algorithm may want to chime in here; my understanding with difficulty changes with KGW implemented factor in hashrates.
So with KGW the next block's difficulty will be much higher regardless of the previous block's difficulty if there is a massive amount of hashrate.
This is unlike previous calculation mechanisms which only factor in the time that the blocks have been found.
Again, this is just my understanding which may be mistaken.