Jaboja - if you see this, post a CAT address! Your code is live in 9.3.0 and I want to send you a 'thank you'!
Fixed a bug in the block acceptance timestamps. The old code was looking back 6 blocks instead of the last block to accept or reject by timestamp. This fix will take effect 09-01-2017 00:00:00 UTC.
I want to take a minute or three and talk about this. As I write this, we're looking for a block with a difficulty of 800.3756. Considering that the difficulty adjust algo has a 1 block change, and the previous 7 blocks have ranged between 361 and 421, how does this happen?
As the old-time CATs already know, CAT was forked from Litecoin back in 2013. Since becoming the devs a few emergency forks after that, we've updated our wallet a number of times, but most of the work has been devoted to finding a difficulty adjust process that keeps us as true as we can be to the community goal of "Bitcoin in scrypt" while also allowing us to surf the waves of profit-switch pools and scrypt ASIC miners. With the release of 9.2.0 and enough 24/7 mining, the past two years have been pretty smooth. Happily smooth!
Things have changed this year. A new generation of scrypt ASIC miners with speeds in the 320-500 MH/s range are on the streets, there are more profit switch pools, and the Bitcoin stress of recent months have brought us new miners and new profitability. We were happy that the diff adjust algo continued to work even in this new environment!
And then, as our profitability increased, we became targets of folks that wanted CAT, but didn't want to mine and didn't want to buy on exchanges. As we have a fairly small 24/7 hash rate relative to our value, it was fairly easy for them to dust off the early Bitcoin exploit of simply building their own blocks and submitting them to the network. They get 50 CAT and don't have to use a lot of electricity.
How many of you have noticed the recent rise in small transactions on the network? How many have noticed that the Cat Listener went from pretty quiet to OMFG THE NOISE?
We saw strange blocks on the network. We found most of them were paid to the same address. It was pretty clear that someone was injecting blocks. So Blak set up a coin transfer process, and we bounced coins back and forth between our wallets in order to more easily identify the blocks mined by legit miners - and to highlight the mischief.
The string of blocks between 116923 and 116942 are a perfect example of this:
Larger eye-friendly view:
http://www.catcoinwallets.com/images/cat_blocks.jpgSo...when one can build their own blocks, they can also set the timestamp in those blocks. When one can set the timestamp, we can have two blocks with a real-world 3 hours of time between them, but a 38 second reported block time. And when the wallet's block time testing isn't working as it should, blocks that are earlier than the most recent in the chain can be accepted as valid. And...here's the important point to all of this: The diff algo uses the encoded block time to adjust the difficulty - it uses the reported block times, not the real-world times. That's why we can have widely spaced blocks - that should result in our difficulty rapidly decreasing - yet find our difficulty rising. And while our algo is designed to rise rapidly when hash power increases, it really jumps when someone tosses in blocks with timestamps that go 'back in time.'
So...the block time testing is fixed. Once we fork on Sep 1st, our friends at 9bU7p5PooXMhequCNWSJQCbaw8sgHp4Ekd are going to find many of their blocks rejected - and that's a good thing!
But CATs - that still leaves the basic POW blockchain weakness of a low hash rate. And having sufficient 24/7 mining on the network is going to be more important as we increase in value.
What we have to figure out as a community is how to get more legit 24/7 mining. Or - another option is to abandon our 'Bitcoin in scrypt' motto and change algo and/or method, and either stay with POW but change to a CPU/GPU only algo, or to leave POW behind and move to a hybrid and/or POS system. We've been resisting the couple of requests we've had over the years to change to POS, but have put all options back on the table as we start work on CAT version 9.4.0.
Anyway..too many words. Community - we can always use more miners. Some of you have joined the network and we thank you! Please give CAT's future some thought and bring your brainstorms back here, please. Do we want to stay with POW no matter what? Do we want to change algo to a CPU and/or GPU method that knocks out the irrational actors? Or do we want to move to a hybrid and/or proof of stake system?
Keep on keepin' on, CATs.
Andy
