How often does Junkcoin difficulty change?

Once every 1,440 blocks — about a day at the 60-second target. This is measured, not assumed: every difficulty change our node has recorded lands exactly on a multiple of 1,440, most recently at the 1,166,400 boundary on 2026-10-09. That is unlike Bitcoin’s and Litecoin’s 2,016-block epochs, and unlike JKC’s DigiShield cousins, which retarget every single block.

Does Junkcoin have halvings?

Not the fixed kind. The node source defines a halving interval and then marks it unused — the real schedule is custom: steep day-based steps at launch, a declining base the project says was corrected in 2025 with accelerated halvings, and on top of it every block rolls documented lottery odds of a triple reward and of a rare jackpot. That is why no current-reward figure appears here: on a lottery chain only a measured average is honest, and our archive is not yet deep enough to publish one. It will be.

Is JKC harder to mine than LTC or DOGE?

The difficulty numbers cannot be compared — each chain’s difficulty is a ratio against its own genesis minimum, and the chains run different block targets and retarget rules. In practice the question dissolves: through AuxPoW the same scrypt machines mine LTC, DOGE and JKC at once, so nobody chooses between them — a pool roster chooses which kickers ride along.

A pressure gauge computed from recent block pace: g is derived from elapsed time versus target and E = (g² − 2) / (πg), clamped to [−1, +1] — positive means blocks are running slower than target (difficulty pressure easing), negative means faster (pressure building). The full recipe, constants included, is published in the API response at basintwo.com/api/chain/jkc.

Junkcoin Difficulty — Live, Daily 1,440-Block Epochs

What is difficulty?

Difficulty is a single network-wide number that sets how much computational work it takes to find a valid Junkcoin block. The higher it is, the more scrypt hashes — on average — must be tried before a block lands. It exists so that no matter how much work the parent-pool basket points at this chain, blocks keep arriving roughly every 60 seconds.

The headline reading (“10.94 M” as of 2026-10-09) is the raw difficulty scaled for display — M = million (×10⁶). It is a ratio against the minimum difficulty of the chain’s first block: that many times harder to mine than at genesis.

How Junkcoin retargets it — one epoch per day

difficulty changes once per 1,440-block epoch (~24 hours at the 60-second target)
· measured on our own node: every recorded change lands on a multiple of 1,440 — most recently the 1,166,400 boundary (2026-10-09)
· between boundaries the value holds flat, whatever the blocks do

Junkcoin does neither of the things its neighbors do. Bitcoin and Litecoin adjust in 2,016-block epochs — a scheduled cliff every ~2 weeks (BTC) or ~3.5 days (LTC); Dogecoin-1.14-class chains retarget every single block via DigiShield. JKC’s Litecoin-base code instead retargets once every 1,440 blocks — a day’s worth at the 60-second target — and our own headers confirm it. At the 54.8-second average pace measured as of 2026-10-09, an epoch lasts 1,440 × 54.8 seconds, which is how long a drifted epoch really runs.

That cadence has consequences a per-block chain never faces: when a parent-pool basket adds or drops JKC mid-epoch, difficulty cannot answer until the boundary — blocks simply run fast or slow for up to a day. The revival made this vivid: in November 2024, piled-on pool work minted the chain’s first 130,000 blocks in three days while daily retargets chased the burst. The window DigiShield closes within minutes stays open here for hours.

The pressure gauge: e_hafeer, recipe included

The “Difficulty pressure” tile is e_hafeer, a signed [−1, +1] reading of recent block pace. +1 means blocks are running far slower than target, so difficulty pressure is easing — a tailwind for the machines already here; −1 means far faster, pressure building — the same machines are about to earn proportionally less. As of 2026-10-09 it read +0.004. The receipt is the recipe itself, served inside every API response and quoted here verbatim:

last 2016 block timestamps: g = sqrt(2 x elapsed/target), clamped to [0.542826416334146, 3.684419069923939] (the positive root of x^2+pi*x-2=0 and its Vieta partner 2/root); E=(g^2-2)/(pi*g). +1 = blocks far slower than target (difficulty pressure down), -1 = far faster (pressure up)

One display convention is ours, not the recipe’s, so we state it: the tile colors the reading only beyond ±0.005 — green when E is above +0.005 (pressure easing), amber below −0.005 (pressure building), neutral in the band between. With the formula above and the raw feed, every pixel of that coloring is checkable.

Merged mining and difficulty

Each chain computes its own difficulty — Litecoin in 2,016-block epochs, Junkcoin in 1,440-block days. The hashrate feeding both, though, is largely the same scrypt work, routed by parent-pool merge rosters. When a basket adds JKC, this page shows it as pace first and difficulty later: blocks run fast, e_hafeer swings negative, and the correction books at the next multiple of 1,440.

One claim we deliberately do not make: a fixed difficulty ratio between JKC and LTC. Dogecoin’s familiar lockstep with Litecoin holds because essentially the whole Litecoin fleet merge-mines DOGE; our own first-day attribution shows JKC’s merged blocks dominated by a single parent pool, which is nothing like full-basket carriage — so no ratio is quoted. We say so rather than guess.

Why it matters for miners

Your revenue is your share of the network, so a sustained +3% rise in difficulty cuts revenue per MH/s by about 2.9% (1 − 1/1.03). On JKC that arrives as a once-a-day step, not a drift — per-MH/s earnings hold inside an epoch, then reprice at the boundary. And because JKC reaches scrypt miners as a kicker on LTC payouts (ViaBTC, F2Pool, Binance Pool, EMCD or Mining-Dutch), this chain’s difficulty moves the bonus layer of a rig’s income, stacked on top of the LTC side rather than replacing it — a bonus layer whose per-block size is itself a lottery on this chain. The Junkcoin Foundation publishes its own merge-mining tutorials aimed at home miners.

FAQ

How often does Junkcoin difficulty change?: Once every 1,440 blocks — about a day at the 60-second target. This is measured, not assumed: every difficulty change our node has recorded lands exactly on a multiple of 1,440, most recently at the 1,166,400 boundary on 2026-10-09. That is unlike Bitcoin’s and Litecoin’s 2,016-block epochs, and unlike JKC’s DigiShield cousins, which retarget every single block.
Does Junkcoin have halvings?: Not the fixed kind. The node source defines a halving interval and then marks it unused — the real schedule is custom: steep day-based steps at launch, a declining base the project says was corrected in 2025 with accelerated halvings, and on top of it every block rolls documented lottery odds of a triple reward and of a rare jackpot. That is why no current-reward figure appears here: on a lottery chain only a measured average is honest, and our archive is not yet deep enough to publish one. It will be.
Is JKC harder to mine than LTC or DOGE?: The difficulty numbers cannot be compared — each chain’s difficulty is a ratio against its own genesis minimum, and the chains run different block targets and retarget rules. In practice the question dissolves: through AuxPoW the same scrypt machines mine LTC, DOGE and JKC at once, so nobody chooses between them — a pool roster chooses which kickers ride along.
What is e_hafeer?: A pressure gauge computed from recent block pace: g is derived from elapsed time versus target and E = (g² − 2) / (πg), clamped to [−1, +1] — positive means blocks are running slower than target (difficulty pressure easing), negative means faster (pressure building). The full recipe, constants included, is published in the API response at basintwo.com/api/chain/jkc.