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btchris does not find any problem with using the number of initial zero bits as a measure of proof of work.
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Please don't paraphrase what I said... what I said was "we already have a way to slow down hash generation: increase the difficulty. Keep in mind that difficulty
is not a bit count [emphasis added], it's more finely granular than that."
In other words, I completely agree with deepceleron.
This is clear and thank you for clarifying! A bit shift modifies possibility by a factor of 2 (half or double it).
Just a question if you know for sure. When calculating the total difficulty of a chain we count the values of the actual hashes or the difficulty targets in the blocks?