Post
Topic
Board Announcements (Altcoins)
Re: target distance?
by
WilliamLie2
on 08/06/2014, 12:59:53 UTC
EDIT: The more I think about this idea of the bias the more scary it becomes.  It not only just restates the difficulty time warp problem as a difficulty+timestamp time warp problem, but actually gives your average miner motivation to timejack attack his peers without even caring to attempt double spend, just to bias their notion of the current time and increase the odds that a "far out" block will accept.  Difficulty adjustment becomes unreliable and volatile. A whole new family of attack vectors get created.  It is all around scary stuff.
What do you mean by bias?

I mean limiting the amount in the future that blocks would be accepted relative to the amount in the past.  These should remain even.

Quote
I'm now much preferring the idea of simply returning to a more classic adjustment, allowing difficulty to potentially go "too far" and including an upward pressure on targettime to bring the chain back into a mineable state should the difficulty exceed the possible traversal time of any possible map generation.  Such an approach seems both very safe and very simple now, by comparison!
Can you be more specific? Your description is too vague for me. How is this different from increasing target time depending on global time that we discussed above?

It isn't really... my concern has only ever really been with the bias and the agreement on current time.  We should not bias (because it is problematic) and we can not use current global time for limiting block acceptance (as it is "virtually undefined") but we can still agree on historical global time for retarget, as in bitcoin, right?
I still don't get it. There are 2 cases:
1. No bias. We accept new blocks that are -30 min or +30 min relative to our time.
2. Bias. We accept new blocks that are -2 hours or +30 min relative to our time.
That's what you mean by bias, right?
But what is the difference between these 2 cases? In both cases miners try to set time as far in the future as they can with all the issues that you and me have just described.