Why is the maximum target not (2^256 - 1)?

Question

I'm reading the Difficulty page on the Bitcoin wiki.

Why is the maximum target 0x00000000FFFF0… instead of (2^256 - 1) (i.e. 0xFFFFFFFFFFFF…)?

Answer 1

If the maximum target was 2²⁵⁶-1, every candidate block would be a valid block.

As even the CPU miner in Bitcoin's first software release was capable of doing 100 kH/s or more, this would have led to a very rough start of the chain, with 1000s of blocks produced per second until the difficulty adjusted.

Because of that reason, the maximum target was probably set to a level that would guarantee not too frequent blocks after genesis.