Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Hardfork to fix difficulty drop algorithm

From: Luke Dashjr <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2016 15:14:35 +0000

On Wednesday, March 02, 2016 3:05:08 PM Pavel Janík wrote:
> > the network. This would result in a significantly longer block interval,
> > which also means a higher per-block transaction volume, which could
> > cause the block size limit to legitimately be hit much sooner than
> > expected.
> 
> If this happens at all (the exchange rate of the coin can accomodate such
> expectation),

The exchange rate is not significantly influenced by these things. 
Historically, it seems fairly obvious that the difficulty has followed value, 
not value following difficulty.

> the local fee market will develop, fees will raise and complement mined
> coins, thus bringing more miners back to the game (together with expected
> higher exchange rate).

Depends on the hashrate drop, and tolerance for higher fees, both of which are 
largely unknown at this time. At least having code prepared for the negative 
scenarios in case of an emergency seems reasonable, even if we don't end up 
needing to deploy it.

Luke