The hashrate has now dropped to 5.25 GH/s for the network but the difficulty has not dropped with the hashrate drop. Why is that? Is that by design?
Changes every 720 blocks.
Seems to me that it is very unresponsive. A block has to be added to the block chain in order to verify the transactions within it. 720 blocks, if they were being generated every 2 minutes, would be one day; but because the difficulty remains high even as the network hash rate drops, isn't it possible those 720 blocks could be generated in as long as _several_ days before the difficulty re-adjusts ? What is the philosophy behind such a rather delayed response to the network hash rate ?