If I understand the BCC difficulty algo, it only drops the difficulty by 20% if the average time across 6 blocks is more than 12 hours long. That is great for taking us from 24 hour blocks to something a bit more reasonable, but won't help us get from slightly under 2 hour blocks to 10 minute blocks. If I'm right (please comment!), that means we are going to be sitting at slightly under 120 minutes blocks until enough start mining to drive it down to 10 minute blocks. e.g. 12X more mining power. Continuing that math, we are now running with a difficulty of about 1/4 of what BTC has... so we either need 1/4 of the hash rate, or we have to wait 2016 blocks for a normal difficulty adjustment. Assuming 2 hour blocks for the foreseeable future, that is about 5.6 months from now... Of course that is linear, so if we quadruple the mining power, it would only be about 6 weeks. All this boils down to BCC having a complex profitability profile right now: If 1% of the hashrate is on BCC, your hash is 100X as important, but you would need to divide that by 12 (call it 8X as important after factoring that in)... so breakeven vs BTC happens if BCC price is equal to 1/8th (0.125) of BTC... I think. Did I do that math right?
Holy balls you may have over-complicated it. There are two separate issues here that don't interact: 1) time until normal difficulty adjustment and 2) profitability of mining right now with personal hash rate
1) This is the one affected by network hashrate. We can see the timestamps at
https://cash.coin.dance/blocks and it looks like it's 2 or 3 blocks per hour already. We'll adjust in maybe about a month, after which it will be crazy lucrative to mine BCC if the price holds or increases and we should all switch.
2) Since this pool does PPS, our pool size doesn't affect our payouts as luck doesn't factor in. Nor does the network hashrate. You only need current difficulty and your personal hashrate to calculate payouts. At about 1/4 the difficulty of BTC, we will get 4 times as many BCC than BTC. The low value of BCC means the electric bill will chew up a substantial part of this, but that pre-electric bill payout will not change no matter how much the network hashrate goes up or down. It is set in stone until the next difficulty adjustment.
I think you're right about the 20% emergency reductions being done. BCC is off the ground!
If that happens, all our mined BCC will go to the utility bill anyway.
