if you went into the wallet console and typed setgenerate true 4

you are mining.

Thanks for the help, I didn't see any visible change so I guess it was working all along.

 he has been working hard to help magi guys!

It would be hard to have this algo implemented with GPU alone, unless compromised approach is used, that would mitigate efficiency a lot.

yeah I was going to do some math on it.

Sounds good. Thanks

Joe and I spent some time yesterday reviewing the difficulty adjustment code and came to the same conclusion.  Even though retargets are done every block, the adjustment uses an exponential moving towards the target difficulty over a period of time. The target timespan for re-adjustment is very short - 30 minutes, whereas many other coins have a target re-adjustment timespan of several days or more.  The effect of this is that when there is a huge influx of mining capacity (as was the case in the minutes after launch) the difficulty changes to account for them very quickly.  This means that people hoping to get an advantage with low difficulty will not be able to, making this extremely fair.  This, combined with the reward being directly proportional to difficulty, means that mining profitability will remain fairly constant from launch onwards.  It doesn't matter whether you have a laptop or a farm of 100 machines, your average reward will stay the same with time, regardless of the network hash.  It is about as fair as a PoW distribution can possibly be**

** the caveat to this is that the reward : difficulty ratio must be high enough to both ensure that coins are minted at the expected rate, AND that the reward is in line with the supply of the old coin that it is being swapped.  IMO the reward is currently too low to fulfill this.  I think the reward needs to be much higher in order to have the PoW period over within a few months as the developer was hoping and right now the daily minting of 5-10k is disproportionate to the 1.25 million coins set aside for the swap.

Paul, I am thinking to lower optimum diff where we get maximum 500 XMG/block; what is your comment on the 'optimum diff'? The new reward better to plug in after pool mining, so all can get a share.

Anyone buying this coin?

72 up for grabs
very hard to mine

This is sort of what I was suggesting.  I think to make a proper analysis we need to ensure that either the netmhashps or networkhashps values are reporting true values (neither appear to be, though netmhashps seems more believable).  Then you can decide how much higher you think the network hash is likely to get in order to achieve the optimum diff.  I haven't yet seen diff over 2, but suspect it will get there if a few more miners join.  So something higher than 2 for sure.  Why not make it linear up to 5, with reward being 100 * diff? (that would yield in the 100-200 range for current diff). 

The one drawback to the short difficulty adjustment timespan is that difficulty fluctuates a reasonable amount whenever "luck" causes two blocks to be found in quick succession or much longer than 3 mins.  I have seen it shift 50% from one block to the next.  This has a knock-on effect that the rewards can also change considerably between blocks.  I'm not sure how to combat this, but perhaps increasing the adjustment timespan slightly (maybe 90-180 minutes) would help, whilst still balancing out the effects significant mining power joining/leaving fairly quickly.