Author: Damian Williamson 2018-02-19 09:04:02
Published on: 2018-02-19T09:04:02+00:00
The author of a proposal has suggested that timestamps in Bitcoin's blockchain may be unnecessary, and that the cryptocurrency can operate with the same security guarantees without them. The alternative difficulty adjustment algorithm would work by using an unlimited block reward algorithm tied directly to the difficulty of each block, which could be modified by miners up or down within certain limits. Timestamps could still be included in blocks, but no longer used for anything significant other than metadata about when the miner claims to have produced the block. Such a system could increase total transaction throughput, potentially leading to centralisation pressures on miners and full nodes, although two mitigations – introducing state checkpoints into the chain itself and/or a sharded protocol – are proposed to address these concerns.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T00:47:21.732536+00:00