been toying with ideas how to reduce orphan rate

this idea of exponential difficulty backoff comes to mind

in standing state the network quickly mines low difficulty blocks DIFF=1

when a fork of depth 1 is observed the DIFF=2 is raised and rate of block generation is halved
deeper forks than 1 cannot be healed.
the fork then can be merged by the successor block and potential doublespend conflicts are resolved
by a list of TX ID's to revert in successor block.

when fork is settled the block speed is slowly falls to maximum again
after two succesive blocks of DIFF=4, the difficulty is again halved to 2, then two more blocks to 1 etc.

obviously the fee doubles with difficulty also
larger blocks have 2x capacity and so on

malleability is fixed by seg witness or schnorr sig etc

https://github.com/blockladder/

opinions?