You are viewing a single comment's thread from:
RE: EOS with DPOS is immune to the GFW attack _because it is more decentralised_
Yes it does. The difficulty adjustment mechanism for Bitcoin is based on every 2016 blocks, not dynamic every block, meaning that Bitcoin does not handle large drops in hashpower well at all. In fact it could be catastrophic, especially with a feedback mechanism of dropping prices and long backlogs as a result of the drop.
Thanks, that's a good point. All these numbers can be changed if miners felt like it. But a reduction in block time to 1/10 what it is now doesn't seem like it would be that harmful. Ditto a big reduction in the readjustment time. Reduce the difficulty and block reward appropriately so it's effectively a no-op for miner income and what do they have to worry about?
Sure we mine all the coins a lot sooner and things get squirly at the end sooner (did anyone really think about that?) but in the mean time BTC is a lot more stable and usable. If we lost 90% of the hash power it wouldn't be any worse than it is right now and the network would adjust a lot sooner.
I assume you mean ten times increase. That would reduce effective transaction capacity by 90% for several weeks. I think that would be extremely harmful for users.
Edit: I think I understand what you mean now. Bitcoin doesn't have a "block time" parameter. "Block time" is a function of difficulty, available hashpower and chance. Miners cannot change these at will, it requires consensus across the community (miners, exchanges, wallets, all relevant economic participants).
That would require a hard fork. The history of Bitcoin governance suggests that would be anything but a smooth fix these days.
Yes, you got what I meant second time - I should have been more precise. And I understand the "block time" issue - it's a statistical measure of the effect of hash difficulty and available hash power and difficulty is adjusted every X blocks to approximate to the mean 10 minute block time, right? (I've never read the code but that was my understanding).
And I understand it requires a hard fork vs. soft fork, but for miners why wouldn't they go with it. More stability for the net, no change in revenue, and since it would increase TPS capacity for BTC and decrease mean confirmation time it would make BTC more competitive with ETH as a utilitarian payment system vs. "store of value" not traded often. Although personally, I think all the work on payment channels and off-chain settlement is the way forward there.
I wish that more people would look at the work being done with Tezos where the consensus protocol is part of the blockchain - which makes it easy to change the rules within the system itself. And a "do-over" is possible - again with consensus.