Seems like the DoS prevention code in GLD prevents people from hopping on when it comes to the top of the profit list.
The defense protects the network by preventing hashpower from being added to quickly.
It basically gives more power to the little guy by removing the advantage of someone using an industrial strength mining rig jumping on the network for some quick and easy coins. Mining goldcoin is no longer an exercise is raw hashing power.
Akumaburn wrote about this is detail yesterday:
https://www.gldtalk.org/index.php?topic=1262.msg6081#msg6081 It`s good on paper, in a system with no price, but the higher price is, higher hashrates will system get - and as it can`t adapt fast - it`s not possible to mine, price go higher and higher - loop.
does it really gives advantage to solo miners with small rigs - no. I was mining 5 blocks an hour - now i`m mining 1 block in 3 hours.
in that case (how this protection currently works) it even sounds that it even easier to attack whole system:
imagine.
1. price is stable for a long period of time.
2. attacker slowly buys coins
3. attacker accumulated desired number of coins
4. attack (just put 2-3 rigs to mine or even buy hashrate contract)
5. "51%" protection in work.... - orphans all over
6. price goes up
7. more people mine cause price go up - chain reaction (like now)
8. attacker waits for decent price - sells coins
9. coin price crash
- miners lost profits, time and electricity (
- only attacker satisfied.
does it sound like current situation?
Nope what happened only happened because the pools had not updated to the latest client/panicked and shut down,
I went through the last ~300 blocks, there was no evidence to indicate a double spend or any kind of abuse.
There are only two ways to attack the coin as is and they both involve a lot of work:
1: Kick majority of existing hashpower off the network(Take the pools down), and replace said hashpower to become the majority of the network. Since you are replacing existing hashpower, the difficulty will be such that you have a higher probability of getting 6 blocks in a row.
2: Hold 80-90% of the total network hashpower long enough to cause several difficulty changes and increase your likelyhood of getting 6 blocks in a row.
Please be sure you are mining on 0.7.1.5 though, as 0.7.1.4 doesn't help the network be more secure.