Re: Kimoto Gravity Well Difficulty Adjustment for Bitcoin
Bitcoin isn't experiencing a sharp drop in hashing power. Bitcoin is a network of anonymous peers. There is no method to compute the exact hashrate, none. It is impossible. The hashrate shown is an ESTIMATE and the margin of error on the 8 hour moving average is huge (something on the order of 20%+).
You are simply looking at noise.
At most the hashrate declined by maybe 0.5%. In reality that is still within the margin of error on the 3 day average so it is far more likely the network is still growing at 1% to 1.5% per day.
The only scenario where a change in the difficulty function would be of any value, is a scenario where Bitcoin is likely dead anyways. If the hashrate drops 80%+ in a two week period there probably is a larger macro economic reason, one that can't be solved by simply adjusting the difficulty faster.
You are proposing a hard fork on a core element of the protocol for something which isn't required. The chance of it happening is ~0%. Hard forks simply don't happen in a consensus network for all but the most critical of changes. If ECDSA is compromised we may see a hard fork, if there is a bug which allows someone to make a billion bitcoins out of thin air we may see a hard fork. Anything less severe than that just has no chance of reaching a consensus. Still if you want to beat your head against the wall you wouldn't be the first.
You are simply looking at noise.
At most the hashrate declined by maybe 0.5%. In reality that is still within the margin of error on the 3 day average so it is far more likely the network is still growing at 1% to 1.5% per day.
The only scenario where a change in the difficulty function would be of any value, is a scenario where Bitcoin is likely dead anyways. If the hashrate drops 80%+ in a two week period there probably is a larger macro economic reason, one that can't be solved by simply adjusting the difficulty faster.
You are proposing a hard fork on a core element of the protocol for something which isn't required. The chance of it happening is ~0%. Hard forks simply don't happen in a consensus network for all but the most critical of changes. If ECDSA is compromised we may see a hard fork, if there is a bug which allows someone to make a billion bitcoins out of thin air we may see a hard fork. Anything less severe than that just has no chance of reaching a consensus. Still if you want to beat your head against the wall you wouldn't be the first.