Insta-mining problems, how to prevent being outgunned? And difficulty + adjustments I created a new coin to learn something about Bitcoin. I cloned the source code, called it something different, put a new logo on it, nothing major. Then I made some nodes available, and put the source on github. The number of connections (aside from me) to the nodes reflected the number of git clones. I'm sure I had an instamine problem, where the hashrate went up and the difficulty went up so that I wasn't able to catch up quick enough and outgun the miners. Even when I did point significant hashpower at my new pool, I just made the difficulty go way up. I mined blocks, but they were orphaned. So was I mining on a different chain? i.e. the "wrong" one that broke off from the original that I wanted to catch up with? There have been some ideas on preventing an instamine. One is to mine a large number of blocks, and before putting out the source code and making it available for anyone