Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Kimoto Gravity Well Difficulty Adjustment for Bitcoin
by
Rannasha
on 04/03/2014, 11:32:40 UTC
KGW won't do anything meaningful for Bitcoin. Even if the Bitcoin difficulty is adjujsted every block, there will still be periods where the average time between blocks is more than 10 minutes. Since the process of finding a block remains a Poisson process, regardless of what algorithm you use to tune the difficulty, block-delays of 30 minutes or more remain a completely real possibility.

The KGW algorithm is designed to combat a block-drought that comes from a sharply decreasing hashrate. As long as the hashrate doesn't go down rapidly, there is no real advantage to using KGW. If blocks take 11 minutes on average instead of 10 for a week or two, then that hardly matters and people won't even notice it unless they look at the data, since the variance in block-delays will obscure these structural deviations from the target average.

And since there is no reason to assume that the Bitcoin hashrate is going to sharply decrease (and not recover), there is no need to update the difficulty algorithm, which would require a hard fork.