Quote from: altcoinhosting on October 27, 2016, 10:07:54 AM

Quote from: tertius993 on October 27, 2016, 09:51:00 AM

Except that the difficulty adjustment is limited to x4 or /4 - so if 90% of the network disappeared for some reason, it would take 10 times as long to get to the next difficulty adjustment, which would be to 1/4 of the previous difficulty and then, assuming the same level of mining, another 5 weeks or so to get to the next adjustment after that, before it was back in equilibrium.

You can look at coins like UNB, to see what happens when they get parked at high difficulty with a very slow difficulty adjustment algorithm.

^^^ This is why i love this forum... I learn something new every day

I had no idear the diff adjustment was limited. Thanks for the comment!

Truly interesting. I wasn't aware of this fact. So if 90% of mining farms are suddenly shutdown, Bitcoin would be rendered effectively unusable for a longer period of time. The effect would clearly be damaging for Bitcoin's reputation, because it shows that the system is fragile to disruptions.

That leads to the question why difficulty adjustments in Bitcoin are done via a step function. Adjusting difficulty continuously using some kind of exponential moving average function would reduce the risks of extreme (mining centralization related) changes in hash power.

Thankfully, hashing power among pools is still adequately distributed. However a lot of mining operations reside in China.

ya.ya.yo!