Author: Neiman 2018-01-30 10:52:21
Published on: 2018-01-30T10:52:21+00:00
The discussion in the bitcoin-dev mailing list focuses on the assumption that a majority of miners are honest, which is critical to the functioning of Bitcoin. While this assumption holds regarding ledger manipulation, Tier Nolan questions its validity concerning timestamp manipulation. Miners can have a financial incentive to be dishonest and manipulate timestamps. Dishonest miners could set their timestamp as low as possible, causing the median to move forward if more than half of the timestamps also move forward. However, there is no apparent financial damage to miners from timestamp manipulation, making the 50%+ assumption questionable. One possible improvement suggested by Nolan is exchanging average with standard deviation in the difficulty adjustment formula, which would better reflect changes in hash power along the interval and disable the option to manipulate timestamps without affecting difficulty. The use of the median of the last 11 blocks is also mentioned as an improved indicator of actual real-time for check locktime. However, both improvements assume that a majority of miners are honest.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T00:22:00.357632+00:00