[Official] We are aware of the difficulty problem.

[akumaburn]

The fork was designed to address this issue, but it appears that one or more parties are mining GoldCoin (GLD) unprofitably in order to force our difficulty up higher than it should be.

These unknown parties place upwards of 1.5GH/s(approximately 3-5 times the hashing power of the entire network) of Scrypt hashing power unto the network just long enough to trigger our 51% defense mechanism, and then leave.

The client detects the huge hash-rate increase, and responds by increasing the difficulty.

This is what causes the ridiculous block times.

I'm sorry for not noticing this earlier, I claim responsibility as a developer for not paying close attention to our network hash-rate graph.

The 248000 fork was designed to stabilize the network difficulty in NORMAL situations. Not a situation where 500% extra hashing power is added at once and then removed right after the defense mechanism is tripped (see the spikes here http://www.coinwarz.com/network-hashrate-charts/goldcoin-network-hashrate-chart).

I do however have some good news.

This problem is correctable, and I do have a viable solution for which I've built a simulation to test with(follow here: https://www.gldtalk.org/index.php?topic=3156.msg14013#new) . Expect another hard fork in the next little while that addresses this problem once and for all.

In the mean time if you would like to help us out, you can try to offset his hash power by renting a Scrypt mining rig here: https://www.betarigs.com/


Regards,

Akumaburn

[akumaburn]

This issue appears to be solved now.

Thank you for your support.