Bitcoin Forum

I've noticed the DOA rate skyrockets on my p2pool node every 3 hours, for a while now. I tried to figure out why, and it's because the diff will drop impossibly low (like 25K) and then so many blocks flood in all at once my miners can't keep up, so the huge # of DOAs happen until all those new blocks are finished flooding in.

Looking at the block explorer this feels exactly like the old timewarp attacks on TRC's difficulty algorithm. An attack would manipulate the timestamps in such a way to get the diff really low, mine a massive number of blocks, then introduce it into the block chain causing an ophan and hundreds (thousands) of new blocks all generating coins only to himself and with no transactions.

That seems to be exactly what is happening now. Since the BTC thread has been locked for a while I can't bring this up there, so I'll mention it here instead, in the hopes the devs will notice and do something about it. The TRC dev tried a few things to try and counter it but eventually had to give up and revert to BTC's basic algorithm to make the timewarp exploits go away.

Uno may need to consider the same, or something like KGW if KGW has no known attack vectors yet.