Re: Proof-of-work difficulty increasing

I think that the overall network is generating the same amount of blocks regardless of the difficulty; the difficulty is intended so that the network generates a block in a relatively constant amount of time. Therefore, this confirmation time should always be around the same.

Satoshi or anyone else can correct me if I’m wrong 🙂

Right, the difficulty adjustment is trying to keep it so the network as a whole generates an average of 6 blocks per hour.  The time for your block to mature will always be around 20 hours.

The recent adjustment put us back to close to 6 blocks per hour again.

There’s a site where you can see the time between blocks, and since block 68545, it’s been more like 10 minutes per block:
http://nullvoid.org/bitcoin/statistix.php

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