4 ms·
Not years. The difficulty is recalculated every 2016 blocks (14 days)[1]. If one chain has 10% hashing power, for less or equal to 14 days the transactions cou
by BenoitP 9y ago
Not years. The difficulty is recalculated every 2016 blocks (14 days)[1].
If one chain has 10% hashing power, for less or equal to 14 days the transactions could take 10 times more to validate. But that's assuming markets aren't correcting miners in the "right" direction in the meantime. Who wants to waste electricity on undervalued coins?
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Considering most of BTCs have been mined at the time bitcoin core had no competition; I'd say BTC rich people would tend to side with them. Because of emotional attachment, economic ties, and most importantly the dumb but very real reason of software maintenance.
[1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining
- comex 9y agoBut if blocks are being produced at 10% of the expected rate, it will take 14*10=140 days before the difficulty is recalculated.
- olegkikin 9y agoIf you're hard-forking, you can increase the recalculation rate for a few first new blocks. You can even recalculate every block for, say, 1000 or 5000 blocks .
- sobani 9y agoBut that wouldn't work for the 'victim chain' of the fork. In this case the idea is that 90% of the miners fork, while 10% remain on the original version. I don't know if non-miners also check the difficulty or difficulty calculations, but if they do, even the minority chain can't fork without affecting existing users. In that case everyone would need to fork in which case you're back to square one: what to do with the users that can't or don't want to fork. And if you need to fork anyway, it makes little sense to go with the minority chain.