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No. From the leading zeros in a block hash you can tell something about difficulty:

000000000000000000007 <- Bitcoin tip
00000000000000000000c <- Lukecoin tip

Same(ish) difficulty

I didn’t realize @siggy47 was talking about the difficulty. Quick question: they can’t change the difficulty without doing a hard fork, right? The difficulty only changes every 2016 blocks, and the next one will be at block 963,648. Is it possible to have different difficulty levels on the two chains?

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difficulty

If you change the actual algo, you won't be able to validate the blocks at all anymore - they will all be invalid. Hard fork = software swap.

they can’t change the difficulty without doing a hard fork, right?

Correct.

The difficulty only changes every 2016 blocks, and the next one will be at block 963,648. Is it possible to have different difficulty levels on the two chains?

Yes. But I think that at this rate, September 1st will come before they found 2016 blocks (and even then, the max retarget is 75% down (i.e. 0.25 * current difficulty) so that won't help them much at these hash rates either)

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