Meaning, if more people mine Primecoin, does it get harder to mine? From what I understand, it shouldn't, but I want to be sure.
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1 Answer
Primecoin mining is doubly competitive (in the sense you described). In fact, the amount you will mine with given power is inversely proportional to the cube of the total network compute power.
As in Bitcoin, a difficulty parameter adjusts based on the mining rate to achieve a desired block frequency. Not only that, but the mint rate is inversely proportional to the (square of the) difficulty. Unlike Bitcoin which has a fixed schedule, which at worst can be slightly accelerated with increasing mining power, in Primecoin the total number of coins that will ever be generated will decrease with increasing competition.
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Can you explain how the minting algorithm works a bit more please?– ShamoonCommented Dec 5, 2013 at 12:29
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@Shamoon: You mean the part where the greater the difficulty, the less the amount minted per block? I think it's simply that in each block, the new generated coins are defined as constant / difficulty ^ 2. Commented Dec 9, 2013 at 9:28