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From: Joel Joonatan Kaartinen <joel.kaartinen@gmail.com>
To: Andy Parkins <andyparkins@gmail.com>
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Date: Wed, 23 Nov 2011 18:26:30 +0200
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Cc: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Addressing rapid changes in mining power
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On Wed, 2011-11-23 at 15:39 +0000, Andy Parkins wrote:
> On 2011 November 23 Wednesday, Gavin Andresen wrote:
> 
> > Bitcoin as-is doesn't have the "I got lucky and found an extremely
> > hard block" problem because the difficulty TARGET is used to compute
> > chain difficulty, not the actual hashes found.
> 
> Good points.  I don't think I have a response to that one.

If there's an upper bound on the difficulty a block is accepted to have
(even if it would've passed with significantly higher difficulty), that
could solve this issue. For example, take the median (or average) of the
past 2016 blocks and don't value any new block for more than maybe 4
times as difficult as that. 

> I saw the "I got lucky" result as a benefit, as it made it harder to fork the 
> chain.  We got an advantage from the luck.
> 
> I'll have to abandon this suggestion.  It's not going to work.
> 
> Thanks for the feedback everyone.

Don't be so hasty with that :)

- Joel