Its a real shame that Version has had such a problematic start. It has real potential as a great store of value crypto.
It has been very frustrating. Version was intended to be my prized coin. I didn't sleep for many days and I lost my day job because of it.
Looks as if the blocks are being harvested intentionally again.
Going to have to take a close look at the distribution to continue with this.
Anyone want to try a mod. of p2pool for Version and I'll run it on the nodes I posted above ?
It is not that they are being harvested intentionally, but we have to wait it out for the difficulty to come up to par again.
There were several nested issues as a result of the KGW algorithm:
1. When proof of stake kicked in and PoS blocks started to join the blockchain, the KGW function was not differentiating between PoW and PoS. This was causing the moving average to get dragged down close to the minimum difficulty and the chain to look like it was "kicking over" into min diff repeatedly.
2. Once we solved that, the other issue is that KGW doesn't handle chain stops and starts. What you wind up with is a very long time difference between the last block and the block before it, and it drags the difficulty down as well, like a time warp attack with a very long time warp.
So, I put in a switch to get us out of KGW and onto the "normal" calculation. Its a simple formula with exponential adjustment, but it will take some time for the difficulty to ramp up to match the hashpower on the network. In the short run it means orphans and the behavior you typically see with a brand new coin lanch, but in the long run it
should result in a more stable chain for us.