Bitcoin does not have a mechanism for quick
mining difficulty adjustments, common today in most of Alts (and soon in Cash).
While that is of course true for any cryptocurrency, due to slow
mining difficulty adjustments, a potentially hostile environment, and the continued possibility for SegWit to activate on the Legacy chain after all, it's probably more true for 148 BTC.
Not exact matches
The main points of differences in Bitcoin Gold which catch our interest are: the Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm,
mining hardware,
difficulty adjustment, and replay protection.
The control of the
difficulty adjustment is extremely important because bigger miners could artificially warp and influence the
mining difficulty by switching their operations on and off to get greater gains.
I think you mistake the historical trend of
adjustments to the bitcoin
difficulty generally being upward, with the actual mechanism where the
difficulty is adjusted to keep the global mean - time - to - valid - block constant, because of the other historical trend of
mining power going up.
While it follows the same
mining algorithm as Bitcoin, BCC uses a different unilateral
Difficulty adjustment mechanism, which is concerning.
And even if some miners do
mine on the Bcash chain toward a
difficulty adjustment, it would just set the exact same dynamic in motion after a while.
Then, last weekend, the Bcash
mining saga further developed, as some miners periodically triggered an emergency
difficulty adjustment, leading to extreme swings in hash power, unreliable block times and increased inflation.
At the beginning, it proved to be profitable to
mine on the Bitcoin Cash blockchain, but once miners started to exploit it, sporadic block generation and
adjustment difficulties resulted in challenges for miners.
So, how would a miner prevent a downward
difficulty adjustment on bitcoin cash and trigger an exodus of
mining power from bitcoin?
Block 478,571 took 13 hours to
mine, so there were six
difficulty adjustments downward.
There are already miners that seem to be ideologically driven to keep
mining on bitcoin cash, but another miner may have wanted to make sure there were six blocks every 12 hours in order to prevent the triggering of the downward
difficulty adjustment.
A few months later, in November 2017, Bitcoin Cash began using a new
difficulty adjustment algorithm (DAA) to better manage the
mining difficulty and the volatile hashpower situation stabilized.
Of course, the genius of the Bitcoin protocol means that as hashing power decreases,
difficulty adjustments take place which make it easier to
mine the coins and verify the transactions again.
In the last
adjustment,
mining difficulty fell by 5.43 % — the largest decrease in the last eighteen months.
October 31, 2017 Kevin Helms Amaury Séchet, BCC, BCH, Bitcoin, Bitcoin ABC, bitcoin cash, bitprim, blocktime, DAA,
difficulty adjustment algorithm, EDA, Emergency Difficulty Adjustment, Hard Fork, Juan Garavaglia, mining, N - Technology, nChain, November 13, Software, Technology,
difficulty adjustment algorithm, EDA, Emergency
Difficulty Adjustment, Hard Fork, Juan Garavaglia, mining, N - Technology, nChain, November 13, Software, Technology,
Difficulty Adjustment, Hard Fork, Juan Garavaglia,
mining, N - Technology, nChain, November 13, Software, Technology, Upgrade 0
In the last
adjustment, bitcoin
mining difficulty fell 3.1 %, dropping to 158.4 billion.