Author: Jorge Timón 2011-11-23 11:51:00
Published on: 2011-11-23T11:51:00+00:00
In a conversation between Andy Parkins and Jorge Timón on November 23, 2011, they discussed abandoning the idea of a target difficulty in favor of every node generating the most difficult block possible. Simultaneously, each node would listen for the most difficult block generated before time T, with T being picked to be the block generation rate of 10 minutes. However, there was concern that miners could cheat the system by putting a false timestamp, increasing their probability of mining a block. The defense against this is to check the timestamp of a received block against the node's own clock and the average network clock, rejecting blocks outside of that band. It was noted that the current system also allows for cheating of timestamps but miners have no direct incentive to do so. Additionally, it was questioned where the network clock was located, with the timestamps in the blockchain being suggested as a possibility.
Updated on: 2023-06-04T21:33:25.204933+00:00