[jtsiskin]

I’m not sure I see what you’re saying. The “arbitrary target” is so high because of all the mining. If there were less miners, the difficult would decrease, and then it would be easier for a malicious party to find one of those 6 lottery tickets.

[mondoveneziano]

I am simply explaining how proof-of-work works.

It is correct that the difficulty is adjusted based on the hash rate. If mining power was halved, it would become twice as easy to hit the target. If a new ASIC would make calculating hashes twice as efficient, the network would make hitting the target twice as difficult, effectively counteracting the efficiency. The goal is to always have 6 successful calculations per hour on average.