I’m imagining this concept as an emergency soft fork in the case of a large and sudden drop in the network hash-power.
It’s my understanding that changing the 2016 block difficulty cycle would require a hard fork (since this is a change of a current consensus-rule)
But is there anything stopping bitcoin form adding an additional adjustment cycle with a soft fork?
The current cycle would not be changed, but an additional independent cycle would be added in between.
Both cycles would be 2016 blocks but they would be out of sync so that they come into effect every other time.
In other words; the difficulty would be adjusted every 1008 blocks.
Can anyone tell me if this is possible?
Calling it an "independent cycle" doesn't make it an independent cycle. It still affects the validity of the blocks that are being added to the blockchain.
It would still be a hard fork.
