There may be a few extra blocks, but no where near what there has been in the past with coin launches. The difficulty will adapt very, very quickly. Within a few minutes it will catch up. Think of it as an incentive to mine at the start of multi-algo. We have tested this on tesnet, it will be nothing like what people have seen in the past. DigiShield will jack up the difficulty very quickly, but this time it will average itself out over the previous 10 blocks. Plus a few other adjustments for better performance (no more stuck chain.)

We thought about changing the starting diff to something much higher, but then the problem is if we artificially raise the initial floor for the difficulty  it will not be able to go lower if needed. This can cause other problems. Since each algo is weighted differently, there is no reliable # to set things to.

We really have no idea what the "right" difficulty should be as there is no reliable way of figuring out what it should be. It is much better to let it find its natural equilibrium.

Once again, there will be a few minutes of bonus blocks for initial miners, but their is no reliable way to avoid this. Think of it as make up for the last few months of mining. We are way behind where we should be as far as coin production. This does not fit in well with our next step in progressing toward a micro payment currency (more of this will be released in the coming weeks.)

If anyone has any other suggestions before we make this the official update release, we have a few hours to make an adjustment. But at this point we do not see any better options?