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There is no they who release new blocks, every X number of blocks (2 weeks on average) all nodes recalculate the difficulty level of the next stint to attempt t
by dekz 16y ago
There is no they who release new blocks, every X number of blocks (2 weeks on average) all nodes recalculate the difficulty level of the next stint to attempt to keep the growth around the expected curve (a new block every 10 minutes). So if some hot new Amazon GPU cloud grid joined and churned out block after block, after the certain X block is reached the difficulty is increased.
- lutorm 16y agoSo what prevents me from changing the code I'm running so that the difficulty level is lower? Is this another instance of "if it's accepted by most nodes then it's the truth" mechanism.
- zrail 16y agoThe way I understand it, consensus rules. You could modify your client, but you'd have to get the majority of other nodes using your code before you could actually affect change.
- rfugger 16y agoIf you lowered your difficulty, other nodes who follow the prescribed convention for setting the difficulty will reject your blocks and any further chain built on them as invalid. Agreement on the formula for computing difficulty is required to have a unified block chain. If a bunch of nodes pick a different difficulty formula, it will fork the block chain, and there will be two different incompatible transaction records.