3 ms·
Maybe it's just that hindsight is 20/20, but given how simple this trick is, I'm surprised this wasn't obvious to someone when declaring the policy.
by ironSkillet 4y ago
Maybe it's just that hindsight is 20/20, but given how simple this trick is, I'm surprised this wasn't obvious to someone when declaring the policy.
- Majromax 4y agoIt seems to me that there's a delicate, probably impossible balance: the difficulty decreases at the critical times, but not fast enough to compensate for the tiebreak. Suppose the difficulty decreased by a lot: at 0:59 it is effectively impossible to mine a block but at 1:00 it is so easy that a speak-and-spell could do it. In that case, it seems like the optimum strategy for a selfish miner would be to try to post-date the timestamp and mine an "easy" block. It would still lose to a legitimately-mined "hard" block, but it would profit in expectation by being the first "easy" block to reach the network. On the other hand, setting a difficulty schedule such that there is no single optimum timestamp might impose a too-fast decay on difficulty.