Author: Allen Piscitello 2013-12-24 04:05:48
Published on: 2013-12-24T04:05:48+00:00
The email conversation between Ryan Carboni and Mark Friedenbach started with Ryan proposing that Bitcoin should have a sanity check where the difficulty would be adjusted downwards if only four blocks had been mined after three days. He projected a Bitcoin mining bubble, which could make his proposal important in the near future. However, Mark pointed out that such adjustments might introduce security risks. If a low-hashpower attacker isolated a user from the main chain for three days without them noticing that network block generation had stalled, they could completely control the block rate. To address this, Mark suggested alternative difficulty adjustment algorithms being explored by some alts, such as the 9-block interval, 144-block window, Parks-McClellan FIR filter used by Freicoin to recover from just such a mining bubble. He believes that if it were to happen to Bitcoin, there would be sophisticated alternatives to turn to, with enough time to make the change.Ryan responded by saying that he thinks Mark misunderstood his statement. In theory, one would have to isolate roughly one percent of the Bitcoin network's hashing power to do so, which would indicate an attack by a state actor as opposed to anything else. Arguably, the safest way to run Bitcoin is through a proprietary dial-up network.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T22:55:54.822253+00:00