The block finding time is now 60 sec (30 blocks found in 30 mins from block 64115 to 64145) so still not near the designed 40 sec.
The diff seems not to jump as high as before any more, but apparently still enough to cause some blocks to take several minutes to be found, slowing the average down quite a bit.
This will continue until the network hash gets a bit higher. Like I said before we had Kimotos Gravity Well before but there are exploits that involve nTime, until someone comes up with a better solution, the only thing that will stabilize the block time is more people mining. So spread the word!
OK, I had the impression that the mining activity had already risen quite a bit, the pool I am on had mostly myself as contributor a couple days ago while this morning it had increased to more than 10% of the Network hashing rate (around 30Mh/s of almost 300Mh/s) so my contribution had shrunk to barely over 1% of the pool. I thought that to be a decent hash rate.
Also, my understanding is that as long as the network hashing rate is constant, the diff does not change as jumps are mostly caused by changes in network hashing rate - which is a result of a profit switching pool... Without them, diff should be relatively constant unless it is very sensitive to block finding rate, which is a statistical and therefor noisy process by definition
Now that almost all blocks carry around 0.3 CGA reward, there is no reason for pools to switch and I'd expected the block finding rate and the diff to stabilize.
I see still large difference between actual block finding rate and design - for example the 40 blocks period from 64132 to 64172 took over an hour, so that is more than 1.5 minutes per block average, while the design is 40 sec. I didn't check the diff of the intermediate blocks but I am surprised that the finding time is more than 2x the designed value.
I am not complaining, just pointing to possible areas to focus on in a next release - we'll have to accept that the mining will generate
much less coins than we'd expect based on calculation - the payout should already be more smooth than before.