cant someone start up a normal mining pool
Currently the problem is not with the pools, but with the fact that ALN has no gravity well mechanism installed to adjust difficulty, this is the same problem encountered by MOON earlier this year. Although it says difficulty retargets every 60 minutes I am almost convinced the dev meant every 120 blocks, as a consequence we see what is happening right now, a large pool hits it with several GH/s, difficulty goes up, the pool jumps of the train again and the remaining miners simply can't solve blocks fast enough, blocks take 20-30 minutes to confirm or longer. If my assumption of retargeting diff every 120 block is correct this would mean it will take well over 1 day for difficulty to come down again to a normal level, and from what I can understand from the code adjustment up or down is set at a maximum of 400% at a time.
Looks like it's happened. Difficulty increased 400% and mining has slowed to a crawl. Been more than 2 days since the last block was found.
10-Aug-2014 19:17:48 height: 560515 difficulty: 0.75915715 tx: 1
10-Aug-2014 19:17:52 height: 560516 difficulty: 0.75915715 tx: 1
10-Aug-2014 19:17:57 height: 560517 difficulty: 0.75915715 tx: 1
10-Aug-2014 19:18:02 height: 560518 difficulty: 0.75915715 tx: 1
10-Aug-2014 19:18:04 height: 560519 difficulty: 0.75915715 tx: 1
10-Aug-2014 19:18:09 height: 560520 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
10-Aug-2014 19:18:27 height: 560521 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
10-Aug-2014 20:00:39 height: 560522 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
10-Aug-2014 21:56:12 height: 560523 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
10-Aug-2014 22:35:58 height: 560524 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 3
10-Aug-2014 22:43:59 height: 560525 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
11-Aug-2014 00:03:45 height: 560526 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
11-Aug-2014 00:27:46 height: 560527 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
11-Aug-2014 04:04:41 height: 560528 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 2
12-Aug-2014 07:02:29 height: 560529 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
12-Aug-2014 07:20:30 height: 560530 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
12-Aug-2014 07:44:01 height: 560531 difficulty: 3.03662859 tx: 1
I've just revived CAGE which was also stalled for the same reason. I changed it to a per-block retargeting algorithm. Is there anyone here with a dev hat on, or should I do the same for ALN?
Only catch is that it will require a hard fork, which means all pools and exchanges will have to update.
To hit retarget without a fork will take about 16 days at 1MH/s, 1.6 days at 10MH/s, etc. But you don't fix the fundamental problem.