Bitcoin Forum

Some of you may have seen my other thread https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=173463.0 Most of this will by copy and paste, no need to write the same thing twice.

Bytecoin was a 1:1 copy of bitcoin which means it was released with a difficulty target of 1 just like bitcoin was. This made sense when bitcoin was released since there were very few miners using very primitive mining hardware. These days with asic this is no longer the case, so releasing bytecoin with a dificulty target of 1 was a huge mistake (hindsight is always 20/20). This incentivized massive amounts of mining power to enter into the market in an attempt to capitalize on blocks that were coming in so fast they were limited only by the latency in the network (as it turns out this is about 1 minute). The problem is that the bytecoin network interpreted this as meaning that there was far more hashing power legitimately interested in bytecoin than there actually was. After the retarget those looking for quick profits left the network and caused the re-target to massively over compensate.

This presents a very serious risk of creating a destructive feedback loop. Miners abandon the bytecoin network because blocks are coming in to slowly and this causes blocks to come in more slowly which causes more miners to abandon which causes blocks to come in more slowly until we never see another block again.

If we ever get to the point where a single block takes more than 24 hours we will know that bytecoin as we know it is dead but this is not necessarily the end of the story. If we do encounter this feedback loop of death we can potentially hard fork. In this fork we would need to manually set the difficulty to where it should have always been. I think this is possible because there are so few of us. In fact i think i know almost everyone involved in bytecoin and i could send each person a personal message so hard forking should be very possible.

So this thread is a bounty for anyone who would like to prepare an updated client just incase we need to hard fork. Since im no pro-programmer im going to crowd source the decision of whether or not your updated client meets the criteria. the criteria being that it needs to solve the above mentioned problem with out introducing any new problems. I will leave this thread open for a while for anyone to attempt to show a mistake in your work. If no mistakes are found than i will release the bounty.

thanks!

WWMTPOD?

Sorry im apparently some sort of noob. i don't even know what language that is.

I think It's teenage text speak, similar to white teenage londoners pretending to be jamaican,innit

if it forks, do i retain the coins i already have or will i have to remine them?

what would Make? T? P? ? Do?

Look at sunnykings repo code to re-target,

think of a fork as a Y... anything at the bottom part of the Y is OK, both chains include it.. but anything after the split.. well you just have to hope your transactions/coins are on the side that eventually gets accepted.

FXT.  ;)

you wouldnt need to hope as long as most of us agreed that the fork was a good idea. Which i think we would if new blocks stopped being mined. Which is the only reason why we would fork. sooo really you dont have anything to worry about.