- A miner can mine Core or he can mine Cash, but with the same hashing power he cannot mine both.
- Get used to mining power swapping chains as Core and Cash prices fluctuate
- When mining power leaves a chain, the expected block wait increases until the next difficulty adjustment
- For Core this is up to 2016 blocks (14 days assuming 10 minute blocks but the double if half the miners have left, four times if 57% have left, etc)
- For Cash it is normally the same, but in case of extreme loss of hashing power a second set of rules kick in, so it starts adjusting down difficulty after 12 (?) blocks.
- Added / reduced hashing power does not influence existing miners’ profitability until the next difficulty adjustment
- Unless longer block time causes people to sell the coin, i.e. lower price
- Core is extremely vulnerable to this. It’s near (or at) full capacity so just a 10% loss of hashing power causes 10% less transaction throughput (per time), which leads to txs stuck in mempool and high fees
- This can lead to a downward spiral where the Core price collapses as people move to Cash and the Core blocktime then increases more and more, and so it takes a very long time until the next block adjustment.
Please don’t take this as a political post. I’m just stating what I believe can happen.
- Is my logic correct? Something I missed?
- What is the likelihood of this playing out?
If Cash does take over, Counterparty will need to add the addrindex patch to it, so good if we at least can prepare a programmer now and pay a bounty if/when it’s time.
Second, we have a dilemma whether, if this does happen, we should use the entire Cash chain (by then also known as Bitcoin 
) or use Core up until a point (meaning include everything that happens now) and then from a certain later block change chain.