No, it would not make it essentially a new coin. It is just a mechanism to exactly counteract destructive oscillations in the difficulty levels caused by people following profit-maximizing strategies and kick in only under some circumstances (which should become rare). It is precisely designed to counteract behavior consisting of dropping major hash power into a coin during easy difficulty times, and mining elsewhere when the difficulty goes up. This mechanism is so unobtrusive and bland and boring in its operation that it could be back-ported to Bitcoin itself, and it would continue to function exactly the same except and unless you suddenly had a 30% drop in hashrate followed by a big increase in difficulty (very unlikely to ever occur on the Bitcoin network). I believe the mechanism will get implemented somewhere first (I am hoping in Catcoins), show how effective it is at eliminating bad incentives in mining, that it will become standard for all the coins. Whatever coin implements it first will have the first mover advantage on this technology, and have added credibility for it in the market. Essentially all it does is make it so if somebody drops in and starts mining during particularly easy difficulty times, their reward is cut in half, just for that one difficulty cycle. If they stay and continue mining, they would get full rewards from the next block forward. Nobody has ever proposed any theory why such a rule is unfair, or how it would fail to counteract coin hopper incentives. Also, nobody has proposed any theory other than coin hopping as to why we are suffering huge and erratic swings in difficulty, or any theory of how people who engage in dumping Catcoins cheaply on the exchanges can replenish their stock of cheap Catcoins except by coin hopping, or any theory on why loyal Catcoin miners suffer reduced profitability other than that coin hoppers dump coins suppressing its value and obtain an unfair share of created coins by cherry picking when they mine the coin.
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