The large TRC-friendly ASIC just landed block 175039 for us. Hoping he stays around to kill a few more until diff drops.
That's nice but I guess that's gonna happen frequently from now on and afaik this was why they introduced the diff halving (that was now abused) in the first place... what's gonna save us when for example at one exchange prices rice dramatically, hash power increases accordingly, then prices drop & miners leave and we are stuck who-knows-where?
Does anybody know where such kind of discussions by the devs can be followed? On terracointalk.org there seems to be not much going on :-(
Looking at the github comments on the patches, I believe the difficulty halving was before the change to an EMA based difficulty algorithm. When that went into place, the halving should have been removed but wasn't, and the attacker found a way to exploit it. Once we're back to "normal" I'm not sure we need the halving.
Remember before attack the network had a lot of hash power on it, sometimes 500Gh or more, and difficulty worked fine to adjust up and down as people changed coins. None of that was using the halving code.
No, they were using the halving code all along, I was monitoring it and you can see it by the fluctuations in the timestamps (+/- 20 mins).
Whenever a block was >5mins old, they'd make their client think it's actually 15 mins in the future ( so the client thinks the block is >20 mins old) to trigger the diff halving). It's difficult to see in the block explorers since they don't have the timestamp when they actually received the blocks, but when you see something like
block 1 10:10h Diff 10000
block 2 10:30h Diff 5000
block 3 10:11h Diff 6000
then you can be pretty sure that the timewarp magic was used for block 2 whereas blocks 1+3 might be from regular miners.
Another scenario was when they found a block that was not yet 5 mins old (so they couldn't use their magic yet) they dated it 5 mins into the past, that way being able to mine the next block at half diff right from the beginning.
Something along
block 1 10:10h Diff 10000
block 2 10:05h Diff 12000
block 3 10:25h Diff 5000
block 4 10:11h Diff 6000
But they did it way better than the attacker from the last few days because they didn't take a 100% of the cake.
And also everybody else was profitting of the generally-low-difficulty as well, whereas last days' attacker was so fast almost everybody else was filling the orphanages.
But there were quite a few situations where we probably had been stuck for quite a while hadn't someone used the halve-diff trick for getting diff back down sooner than otherwise.
Kind regards
Mike