Bitcoin ABC has proposed a hard fork of the Bitcoin Cash protocol to correct problems associated with the cryptocurrency’s Emergency Difficulty Adjustment (EDA) algorithm.
The Problem With the Bitcoin Cash EDA
Ever since Bitcoin Cash forked away from the main Bitcoin blockchain on August 1, its network has experienced wild hashrate and block time fluctuations. The reason for this is that the EDA automatically adjusts in response to network conditions to help ensure that Bitcoin Cash remains profitable to mine.
However, because miners can easily switch between Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash — and some mining pools are set up to automatically mine the most profitable chain — they exploit the EDA by mining Bitcoin until the Bitcoin Cash difficulty plummets and profitability increases. Then, they switch a significant amount of hashpower over to Bitcoin Cash, causing blocks to be found almost every minute. Eventually, this triggers another EDA, which makes Bitcoin Cash less profitable to mine, and most of the miners transition back to Bitcoin, making the block time increase to an unreasonable level for a currency that claims to be built for everyday transactions.
Bitcoin ABC’s Proposal
Bitcoin ABC is proposing a hard fork that will activate an updated Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) that is based on the D601 algorithm developed by Bitcoin ABC’s Amaury Sechet. According to the Bitcoin ABC announcement, the new DAA seeks to accomplish the following goals:
- Adjust difficulty to hash rate to target a mean block interval of 600 seconds.
- Avoid sudden changes in difficulty when hash rate is fairly stable.
- Adjust difficulty rapidly when hash rate changes rapidly.
- Avoid oscillations from feedback between hash rate and difficulty.
- Be resilient to attacks such as timestamp manipulation.
Bitcoin Classic says the updated software will be available by November 1 and the hard fork will activate on November 13.
No comments:
Post a Comment