Author: Gregory Maxwell 2016-03-02 17:53:46
Published on: 2016-03-02T17:53:46+00:00
In a bitcoin-dev email thread, David A. Harding and Luke Dashjr discussed the potential need for a hard fork to the difficulty adjustment algorithm in order to quickly adapt to a significant drop in mining rate. However, Harding believes that the likelihood of such a drop is low due to the majority of hashrate being equipment with state-of-the-art power efficiency. While he thinks it's prudent to have a difficulty step patch ready to go in case of a network stall, he does not believe a pre-programmed ramp and drop is necessary. Additionally, he warns against changes that tolerate difficulty drops as they may make the network more vulnerable to partitioning attacks and other issues.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T23:14:42.673325+00:00