Early this morning, Digitalcoin block 523,800 came and went and the hard fork went off without a hitch. Digitalcoin has drastically changed it’s stats in hopes of combating the inflationary issues it was having as well as the issue of the profit seeking pools driving difficulty up and exploiting the low difficulty moments.

The new update brings a lower block reward of 15 instead of 20. The time between blocks has been increased to 40 seconds from 20. The difficulty retargetting will take effect every 108 blocks instead of every 1080 blocks. The difficulty adjustment has also been limited to a maximum of 38% in each direction. These are significant changes and should effectively drop the rewards by approx 60%.

The hopes of this update is that even if a profit seeking pool hops on to the coin, they will only be able to exploit the low difficulty for 108 blocks at a time, and the difficulty won’t be able to spike as high as it would when the profit pool leaves. This is very good for the loyal miner as they will be offered more constant rewards and won’t miss out on the low difficulty rewards when the profit pools hit. The drop in rewards and the longer block times will also help combat the inflationary issues and make the coin slightly rarer in hopes of deterring people from simply cashing in as soon as they mine to convert back to BTC.

Another thing working in Digitalcoin’s favor is the new CryptoAve exchange set to launch by the end of this year. CryptoAve will offer fiat exchange for DGC (along with SRC, ARG, LTC & BTC). Internal testing is set to begin any day now with a closed beta testing phase starting in late November. Open beta testing and public release for CryptoAve looks promising for sometime in December.

Best of luck to the Digitalcoin team and congrats on the successful update!