Author: Tamas Blummer 2019-05-24 16:23:38
Published on: 2019-05-24T16:23:38+00:00
In a discussion on bitcoin-dev, Pieter Wuille suggests that if the difficulty can be directly observed by the script language, it would complicate implementation of mempools and make reasoning about validity of unconfirmed transactions harder. To deal with this issue, Natanael suggests that the value exposed should be the sum of accumulated PoW, or in other words the sum of each block's difficulty value in the entire chain. This value will only rise unless a reorg happens after a difficulty drop, which is only likely to occur if users manually blacklist an otherwise valid block that is several blocks back in the chain.Tamas Blummer agrees with this suggestion, stating that log2work is already computed and would be a strictly increasing value, like time. He thinks attempting an implementation will give further clues as to whether this is more suitable to express the same.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T19:04:35.899537+00:00