Quote from: jubalix on April 08, 2013, 08:33:52 AM

Quote from: crazy_rabbit on April 08, 2013, 06:30:14 AM

MODS- I'm posting this hear because it's about bitcoin

Right now, TRC has ground to a halt because it's difficulty was taken sky-high thanks to some ASICS that hopped on the network and then hopped off, leaving the difficulty incredibly high, and it taking everyone else forever to solve the block required to bring it down. It's brought the network to a standstill (although there is a fix being released for this).

Although of course TRC difficulties are incredibly low, so it makes this sort of attack easy to do- it does make one wonder how the bitcoin network would react. As we grow and grow, eventually we will get to a size large enough that we are threatening for various other interest groups (if we aren't already). Although ASICS have made it much more expensive to attack the network, they haven't yet become widespread enough to claim we are really 'safe'.

If a State actor (for example China) were to put some time and money into it, they as well could develop a line of ASICS (indeed the only functioning ASICS are out of china- the government need really only seize their already completed designs and pay the factory to seriously ramp up production). With a large ASIC farm one could take the Bitcoin difficulty so high that when they leave the network the remaining bitcoin miners are stuck for hours trying to solve one block. As TRC shows you need only to slow down block production by a couple hours to induce widescale panic.

Thoughts?

Could difficulty be set by inverse of transaction volume level being sort x hash rate

so the more transaction you have the dificulty goes down

ir decoupling difficulty to generate new block and the block chain from the transaction difficulty, thus avoiding the point your asic to mine, they could still do that but not affect the transactions side of the CC

Difficulty is set in the block and there is a good reason it's set the way it is currently. Its just that now with ASICS even bitcoin (although even more dramatically so for Terracoin) hash power is disproportionately concentrated. Imagine a perfect storm of Manufacture defect so ASICS failing at the same time, plus rising value of a coin like LITECOIN that for price reasons sucks the GPU miners onto the LTC chain.

With Diff on Bitcoin ASIC high, and price Litecoin higher then usual, you would have an unnaturally low amount of hash power on the BTC network while simultaneously having an ASIC high difficulty. And you would be stuck there for 2 weeks.