zawy12
**CryptoNote** coins do not normally have a bits field or "maxTarget aka "powLimit" aka "leading zeros". This means difficulty = avg number of hashes needed to find a solution. ```CN...
These show typical hashrate jumps when difficulty accidentally falls about 20% low. The **magenta spikes** are when the avg of 11 solvetimes were > 2.1x faster than the target, indicating...
**TL;DR** Digibyte's Multishield does a secure and accurate calculation for chain work when a coin allows multiple POWs, despite the problem caused by different POWs having vastly different difficulties and...
Here are all the common difficulty algorithms. All equations are expressed as floating point to make the math clear. Typically, you expand the equations for target's really high value to...
[ 2022 Update: The error factor (and all the equations that follow) needed to be error = target/N * (0.5-e^(-t/T)) This tweet thread supersedes this article. https://twitter.com/zawy3/status/1491958678852886554 And updated image...
This article is about the ASERT difficulty algorithm that was independently discovered by Jacob Eliosoff, [Mark Lundeberg](http://toom.im/files/da-asert.pdf), and a group at [Imperial College](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2006.03044.pdf). Jonathan Toomin did a lot of work...
**Begin update:** This article is long and complicated because I wanted to cover every possibility, such as RTT which I'm sure no one is going to push. To make this...
Chain work does not correctly determine the number of hashes performed if the number of blocks are few or if the difficulty is changing a lot compared to the hashrate....
[Brewer's CAP theorem](https://www.infoq.com/articles/cap-twelve-years-later-how-the-rules-have-changed/), [Vlad's tradeoff triangle](https://twitter.com/VladZamfir/status/942271978798534657), [Vitalik's Scalability Trilemma](https://eth.wiki/sharding/Sharding-FAQs), and [Trent's DCS triangle](https://blog.bigchaindb.com/the-dcs-triangle-5ce0e9e0f1dc) are different ways to express consensus goals competing for the average node's limited bytes/second bandwidth (**BW**). A...
@jtoomim has put a lot of work into difficulty algorithms this year and brought 2 "discoveries" to my way of thinking. The first is that the delay to confirmation for...