The difficulty of Bitcoin drops whenever the average time between blocks within a given difficulty period (~ 2 weeks, as determined by block height) exceeds 10 minutes. Thus it drops if less hashing power is dedicated to the network, but only at the end of a difficulty period and only if the hashing power stays low until then.
If a significant amount of hashing power is lost, difficulty can take longer to re-adjust, due to the increased time between blocks (while the duration of a difficulty period strives to be 2 weeks, it is actually determined by block height, not by timestamps).
If a significant amount of hashing power is lost, difficulty can take longer to re-adjust, due to the increased time between blocks (while the duration of a difficulty period strives to be 2 weeks, it is actually determined by block height, not by timestamps).
So in theory, if these miners support a specific fork and they dedicate a bunch of miners to that fork, we will soon see a
decline in the difficulty of the Legacy Bitcoin. Yes, they do jump back and forth... but we still lose hashing power to these
forks every time a new chain is formed. This is the point I am trying to make. {temporary or permanent loss... we still lose
some hashing power}
Yes. That in itself is not the problem though. The part where it gets nasty is that a significant hashrate decline will increase block times and thus decrease transaction throughput until the end of a difficulty period. Arguably this will help kill off the minority chain rather sooner than later though, making sure that only one chain survives.
Ah, Good point.. I also hear Bitcoin Gold will adapt the difficulty much quicker than the legacy Bitcoin, but it will not use the
same Algorithm, so it is not a problem for the Legacy Bitcoin. The proof-of-work that they’ve chosen is Equihash, a memory-
hard algorithm that’s fairly ASIC resistant. We only have to worry about SegWit2X....
