(sorry to keep going off-topic on I0coin)
But, my theory is this:
Someone is doing testing or has deployed, or is in the process of deploying, a large amount of ASIC using covert asic BOOST. Reasons being:
1. Sudden large increase of hash power and diff on Bitcoin and Merged-mined BTC coins
2. Empty/small size blocks
- Empty blocks being added to BTC's chain
- Small block sizes
Mining empty blocks and small blocks are clues that covert asic boost is in use. Covert asic boost
"Miners must look for one collision of 4 bytes, which is 32 bits so this collision is one of 232 hashing attempts. We take the square root this due to the birthday paradox to arrive at a n approximate expected total of 65,536 attempts.
Each attempt may require changing the extra nonce to generate a new Merkle root hash. However, due to the structure of the Merkle tree, this would require even more additional hashing. If we change the extra nonce, a new is hash is required for each row of the Merkle tree. For a large Bitcoin block with perhaps 10 or more rows, this is a lot of extra work and is an inefficient process.
The following methodologies may make this process more efficient:
Option 1 is to produce empty or smaller blocks. This simply reduces the size of the Merkle tree and therefore requires fewer hashing operations to generate a different Merkle root hash. The extra nonce can therefore vary in the normal way to produce more Merkle root hashes."
- A few other options to make the process more efficient.
Each option, however, can have an undesirable effect on your operations if not done correctly, which brings me to:
3. Skewed transaction time stamps.
- We are seeing a large # of blocks containing (received) time stamps that are way out out whack. I can think of many reasons this would happen:
- Huge hash increase on local network overloading systems (self inflicted DDoS). Think of a computer processor and system like a highway. Sudden increase of massive amounts of data clogs
things up. Quite simply, if there are any constraints placed upon the call to/from the clock register, there will be time corruption.
- Buggy or flawed/low quality chip design
- Sudden temperature changes
- Environmental issues causing frequency changes
- Power supplies that are not clean/stable
- Packet storms and overloaded network resulting in timing update issues
If current UNIX time is 1530041671 (06/26/2018 @ 7:34pm utc), and system issues result in time being updated or read as say, 1030041671 (one bit off), we see transaction received time set to 12/04/2002 @ 10:41pm UTC
China is supposed putting an end to crypto miners in China. Complete BS obviously.. Seems like they are ramping things up instead.
That is some great analysis and really helps me picture some of what is happening here. Let me ask you though - with all of your facts on mining and such not being my wheelhouse - who can factually prove that Bitcoin (BTC) is directly minting its own new coins? By producing a block reward from mining BTC directly?
What I mean that is it is obvious both I0C and DVC are minting their own coins via their own block reward. We can see that in the raw block data. With BTC we do not see any proof of that, in fact if you have read my Medium posts on Devcoin (DVC) you see that the source of Newly Generated Bitcoins is just a covered up cross-chain transaction where the input is an outbound (vout) block reward of 12.5 DVC.
Now read that as much as you need to. It is really hard to word, but the block reward for DVC is supposed to be 50,000 DVC. All one has to do is look in the raw block data to see only 12.5 DVC are awarded in AuxPow to DVC and then that those 12.5 DVC are immediately output to a BTC address. They show up on the BTC ledger at Blockchain.info.
How is that not ground breaking? The fact that the DVC vout pubkeyhash meets up with the I0C Op_Hash160 pubkey on the BTC ledger is even further proof that there is certainly a way to reverse these invalid unspent transactions right back to their real main chain of AuxPow - I0C.
That's clear as ever in my articles.
Combined with your analysis - we see that the ASIC boost proves China is stepping up their mining effort to 51% "BTC". However such an attack can only come by way of them processing BTC transactions, since BTC does not mint its own coins.
So then when that attack takes place, the protection mechanism kicks in to reverse all of these invalid "newly generated coins" block rewards to DVC and via AuxPow to I0C. The scenario here is the Devs are protecting Bitcoin by allowing a 51% attack from somewhere only to show a backup plan and 99.99% minted blockchain exists. It won't be able to be 51'd with that amount minted and is very, very secure with the high hash rate I0C DVC + NMC GRP IXC (the original 5 merge mined coins).
I believe that will happen very soon. By Q3 - July 1, 2018. So hold onto your belt buckles folks.
EDIT: It has to be said, IMO, that I believe Bitmain is going to run this attack as an exercise for Bitcoin's overall health and to prove it is very secure against mining attacks -> this will gain public praise -> mass adoption will follow.