[Bitcoin-ml] Difficulty adjustment

[Antony Zegers]

On Fri, Aug 25, 2017 at 12:25 PM, Amaury Séchet via bitcoin-ml
<bitcoin-ml at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:
> Hi all,

...

> That being said, I would like to be proactive rather than reactive, so I
> worked on the problem to make sure we can deploy something if/when we think
> it is needed.

This work looks very promising, I hope you keep working on it, even if
it takes a while before this can be implemented via hard fork. I think
it makes sense not to rush, and to have the best possible solution
that will last for the long term once it is in place.

> We can use this to define a base target by computing the work done over the
> past 2016 blocks and the time it took. Because individual block time
> variation do not matter much over 2016 blocks, this gives a very stable
> output. However, it is unable to adjust quickly when required. So we also
> want to compute a fast target, on a much smaller timeframe. I found 130
> minutes to work well and a minimum of 5 blocks to make sure we aren't
> undersampling. Because we weighted the average based on block time, it is
> also useful to not chose a specific number of block but rather focus on a
> timeframe rather than a block count.

Just to be clear, when you talk about work done over 2016 blocks, are
you talking about a sliding window of 2016 blocks, with work being
calculated with each block produced?
And not the current Bitcoin fixed 2016-block windows?


Antony