Author: Gavin Andresen 2011-11-23 15:09:10
Published on: 2011-11-23T15:09:10+00:00
In an email conversation between Christian Decker and Gavin Andresen on November 23, 2011, Decker expressed concerns about the "hardest block found in X minutes" scheme. He pointed out that if a miner were to find an extremely hard block, they would have an incentive to keep it secret and build more blocks on top of it before announcing them all at once. If the rest of the network rejected this longer chain because the extremely hard block was not announced in a timely fashion, it would be difficult for the network to recover from a real split.Bitcoin, as it was at the time, did not have this problem because the difficulty target was used to compute chain difficulty, not the actual hashes found. In response to this issue, Gavin Andresen proposed a different method for dealing with large hash power drops for the testnet on the forums. It is unclear what this proposed method was, but Andresen mentioned that he was testing it that day.
Updated on: 2023-06-04T21:31:18.335170+00:00