Author: Ben Kloester 2017-10-11 01:44:52
Published on: 2017-10-11T01:44:52+00:00
In an email exchange on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list, Scott Roberts proposed a new difficulty algorithm to avoid potential issues related to miners seeking maximum profit without due regard to security, users, and nodes. The proposal suggested a hard fork to implement a new difficulty algorithm that uses a simple rolling average with a much smaller window, with the reward adjusted based on recent solvetimes to motivate more mining if the solvetimes are too slow. However, Mark Friedenbach responded by saying that while the problem of fast acting but non-vulnerable difficulty adjustment algorithms is interesting, he disagrees with the idea of creating a contingency plan in case the incumbent chain following the Bitcoin Core consensus rules comes under 51% attack, adding that doing so would be hypocritical and rushed. He suggested reframing the proposal as a hardfork wishlist research problem for the next properly planned hard fork, if one occurs.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T21:34:09.682460+00:00