From: Luke Dashjr <luke@dashjr.org>
To: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org,
	Matt Corallo <lf-lists@mattcorallo.com>
Date: Tue, 9 Feb 2016 22:10:43 +0000
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	<56BA618C.4010301@mattcorallo.com>
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Message-Id: <201602092210.45265.luke@dashjr.org>
Cc: Anthony Towns <aj@erisian.com.au>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] On Hardforks in the Context of SegWit
Precedence: list

On Tuesday, February 09, 2016 10:00:44 PM Matt Corallo via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> Indeed, we could push for more place by just always having one 0-byte,
> but I'm not sure the added complexity helps anything? ASICs can never be
> designed which use more extra-nonce-space than what they can reasonably
> assume will always be available, so we might as well just set the
> maximum number of bytes and let ASIC designers know exactly what they
> have available. Currently blocks start with at least 8 0-bytes. We could
> just say minimum difficulty is now 6 0-bytes (2**16x harder) and reserve
> those?

The extranonce rolling doesn't necessarily need to happen in the ASIC itself. 
With the current extranonce-in-gentx, an old RasPi 1 can only handle creating 
work for up to 5 Gh/s with a 500k gentx.

Furthermore, there is a direct correlation between ASIC speeds and difficulty, 
so increasing the extranonce space dynamically makes a lot of sense.

I don't see any reason *not* to increase the minimum difficulty at the same 
time, though.

Luke