Quote from: coinmaster222 on November 17, 2014, 07:23:37 AM

Complete guff

Go and promote your other rubbish-coins in the alt-coin subforum. This is technical discussion post.

Quote from: chairforce1 on November 16, 2014, 03:27:17 PM

I just woke up and had this thought in my head.

In the highly unlikely scenario all miners cooperated and...

1) All miners are taken off the network at the next difficulty re-target.
2) In the following two weeks difficulty is re-targeted to zero.
3) All miners then come online and exploit the difficulty.
4) Nobody attempts a 51% attack during the process.

...would the following be possible?

The introduction of 280 PH/s into a low difficulty network allows for greater than 4032 blocks to be mined at the end of two weeks following the re-target (the estimate of how many blocks would be found in 4 weeks had nothing changed is 4032 unless I've mistaken something). The entire process is repeated until all blocks are mined.

I would think that it would be possible since the network can only miss out on 100% of the 2016 blocks that would be mined in 2 weeks with nobody on the network, but the network can mine much greater than 100% of 2016 blocks for 2 weeks with a hash rate many orders of magnitude greater than the difficulty.

Huh

As other have noted, the difficulty retargets every 2016 blocks to a level which should give you ~10 minute blocks at current hash rate. This has the effect of retargeting difficulty *roughly* every two weeks. The "final mint date" has been extrapolated from there to about 2140, this shoudl be relatively accurate.

There is also a hardcoded minimum and maximum retarget amount (400%), this prohibits the addition/withdrawal of a signifcant amount of hashing power causing a sever difficulty retarget. wihtout this a malicious actor could add say 30% of network has rate for 2 weeks, then after the retarget withdraw it all, leaving blocks going unsolved for (unnaceptably) long periods of time. The reverse is also possible where a large amount of hashign power would suddenly be added and blocks would confirm extremely fast.