I was just thinking about the way block difficulty is calculated, and how people may (in future) decide whether to mine or not.<div><br></div><div>Is it possible that when the difficulty is low, many will decide to mine, producing blocks every 3 or 5 minutes, and then in 1 week, bitcoin will increase the difficulty, and many will decide it is no longer cost effective, stop mining, and find blocks are being produced every 30 minutes for the next 6 weeks, before the returning to a previous difficulty where people decide to mine again, etc, etc.</div>
<div><br></div><div>Seems reasonably possible in my mind, and I&#39;m wondering if the stability so far has been purely due to people mining without thinking too much about the immediate cost-effectiveness (or mining by zombie-farms).</div>
<div><br></div><div>Thoughts, anyone?</div><div><br></div><div>Ed</div>