[Bitcoin-development] Difficulty adjustment / time issues

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 5:36 PM, Alex Waters <ampedal at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 14, 2011 at 4:28 PM, Gavin Andresen <gavinandresen at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> What do other people think?  I think it is too high risk for too
>> little benefit and shouldn't be done until we have a really compelling
>> reason to introduce a forking change.
>
> Could we bundle this and potential future blockchain-splitting changes
> - to implement them in a major release (down the road)? Or save them
> for when they are very necessary?
>
> TL;DR shelf it until needed, have it written just in case.

I'm generally opposed to doing "too much" at once in this kind of change.

Some changes, like this one, are completely uncontroversial (except
some argument about having fork causing change at all) where some have
more complicated social/economic impacts (the block size being among
them, though probably not the worst).

Moreover, the longer we go between such changes the more the cost is
perceived to be infinite. Better to take one per year, with six months
of gap between implementation, and give everyone the right
expectations than to have prolonged arguments due to our inexperience
that only get trumped by emergency changes.

General network health and user security _requires_ periodic upgrades
in any case, and will for the foreseeable future. The whole notion
that old versions will _stop working_ would be a pretty good thing at
this point in bitcoin's existence, judging by the high number of
pre-.24 listeners still reported.