Author: Jacob Eliosoff 2017-11-04 03:37:06
Published on: 2017-11-04T03:37:06+00:00
There is some concern that changes to the DAA (difficulty adjustment algorithm) for Bitcoin Cash (BCH) may have implications for Bitcoin (BTC). The current DA is only sufficient if the coin has the highest hashpower and may lead to long block delays. High transaction fees could help miners defect back to BTC, but if SegWit2x manages to be more comparable in price than BCH, hashpower could very well oscillate back and forth between the two coins, causing delays in both of them. The first one to hard fork to fix the difficulty problem will have a large advantage, as evidenced by what happens in alts. Developers are advised to watch what happens as BCH goes live with a much better algorithm, in case BTC needs to hard fork for the same reason and needs a similar fix.Scott Roberts has suggested that Bitcoin may need to hard fork to employ a similar algorithm to that being used by BCH, which is likely to be simple and tested. The BCH algorithm uses a median of 3 for the beginning and end of the window to alleviate bad timestamp problems and has 2x and 1/2 limits on the adjustment per block. Roberts recommends that BTC consider using it and making it N=50 instead of 144.Another contender to the BCH algorithm is the D622 algorithm devised by Degnr8, which gives a linearly higher weight to the more recent timestamps, although others have probably come across it and there is too much noise in difficulty algorithms to find the good ones.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T21:59:27.252515+00:00