I really idea behind this project! I have a question though..
Why did you choose to adjust difficulty every 72 blocks instead of every block?
It's a good question. Originally we set the difficulty retarget to occur after 2 weeks roughly 1000 blocks, rather than 12 hours (72 blocks) There's pros and cons to any retarget time. Let's look at some examples of retarget times and their respective issues.
🥕2 week retarget timeLets consider a network in its infancy. In fact, most vulnerabilities to attack with block difficulty only happen when the network hash rate is low, so when the network is new for example. If a malicious miner came in with a lot of hashing power, they could greatly increase the mining difficulty, making mining less attractive to normal miners. Then the other miners start to leave, as mining becomes less profitable. Then the attacker leaves.
What is left is an insanely high mining difficulty and nobody mining. So the 1000 blocks it would take to retarget the difficulty again are never mined and the network dies.
The devs saw an example of this in an altcoin who's devs we are close to. They had to spend a lot of money to hire GPUs just to mine enough blocks to retarget again.
OUCH🌽Retarget every block, 10 MinutesYou might have guessed the same problem can occur here. A powerful miner can attack the network with high hashing power for a short amount of time rendering the next block very high difficulty, as the malicious miner sustains the high block time, the smaller miners are not profiting and leave the network. A malicious miner can automate leaving and joining the network to optimise his reward
EDIT: This might actually be the best way, because to sustain a high difficulty, the malicious miner MUST mine consistently - as soon as he leaves, the block difficulty decreases
🥑12 hour retargetA powerful miner would have to be committed to mining the Veggie network for 12 hours to drive up the mining difficulty, only then would he be inconveniencing the other miners. Then he only has a 12 hour window to mine profitably before the network rescales the difficulty. We think its sort of a sweet spot. A powerful miner would have to be mining most of the time to manipulate the network for their benefit, and not many of them do that
