[bitcoin-dev] Hardfork to fix difficulty drop algorithm

[Peter Todd]

On Wed, Mar 02, 2016 at 11:01:36AM -0800, Eric Voskuil via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> > A 6 month investment with 3 months on the high subsidy and 3 months on low subsidy would not be made…
> 
>  
> 
> Yes, this is the essential point. All capital investments are made based on expectations of future returns. To the extent that futures are perfectly knowable, they can be perfectly factored in. This is why inflation in Bitcoin is not a tax, it’s a cost. These step functions are made continuous by their predictability, removing that predictability will make them -- unpredictable.

You know, I do agree with you.

But see, this is one of the reasons why we keep reminding people that
strictly speaking a hardfork *is* an altcoin, and the altcoin can change
any rule currently in Bitcoin.

It'd be perfectly reasonable to create an altcoin with a 22-million-coin
limit and an inflation schedule that had smooth, rather than abrupt,
drops. It'd also be reasonable to make that altcoin start with the same
UTXO set as Bitcoin as a means of initial coin distribution.

If miners choose to start mining that altcoin en-mass on the halving,
all the more power to them. It's our choice whether or not we buy those
coins. We may choose not to, but if 95% of the hashing power decides to
go mine something different we have to accept that under our current
chosen rules confirmations might take a long time.


Of course, personally I agree with Gregory Maxwell: this is all fairly
unlikely to happen, so the discussion is academic. But we'll see.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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