Fixed total hashrate

Scaling with constant energy expenditure and maintained security.

A key distinction between XenBlocks and Bitcoin revolves around the approach to managing the total hashrate within their respective networks. While most Proof of Work (PoW) systems, including Bitcoin, experience an increase in total hashrate as more miners join, thus continuously growing in computational power, XenBlocks employs a different strategy:

XenBlocks maintains a constant global hashrate of around 10 million hashes per second (10M h/s or 10,000 K h/s). As the network's difficulty level rises, the system automatically adjusts by reducing the hashrate allocated to each individual miner. This means that as more miners participate, the amount of power used by each decreases.

Instead of allowing the total hashrate to escalate indefinitely, XenBlocks opts to distribute a fixed total hashrate among all miners. This results in individual miners observing lower hash rates over time as the network grows. Each difficulty increase leads to a reduction in the personal hash rate achievable by miners.

This method contrasts with older algorithms used by networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum, where the hashrate can increase without bound and is not dynamically adjusted in this manner. On these networks, the difficulty adjusts, but the concept of a fixed global hashrate doesn't apply, allowing total network power to grow with the addition of miners.

This design implies that, assuming continued growth of the network, individual miners may end up generating fewer hashes per second over time, though they can still contribute significantly at present.