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

From: Paul Sztorc <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 2 Mar 2016 20:06:27 -0500

On 3/2/2016 12:53 PM, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> What you are proposing makes sense only if it was believed that a very
> large difficulty drop would be very likely.
> 
> This appears to be almost certainly untrue-- consider-- look how long
> ago since hashrate was 50% of what it is now, or 25% of what it is
> now-- this is strong evidence that supermajority of the hashrate is
> equipment with state of the art power efficiency.

I don't understand the relevance of this.

In my view, we would prefer miners to invest in hardware just a mere
2016 blocks away from the halving. Instead, they've made them too soon.
Assuming that miners are already located in low-power-cost areas, the
difficulty will be quickly rising to compensate for "state of the art
power efficiency".

So it will have canceled out by July.

If anything, the more efficient miners become today, the bigger our
potential problem in July, because chip-manufacturers may have used up
all of the easy efficiency-increasing moves, such that investments do
not take place in June.

Paul