Thread - Nostr Hypermedia

The difficulty adjustment is total network difficulty. That means the work would have to be the overwhelming majority hashpower continuously. Without ANY of that work appearing to the main chain as the highest block. Then after 10000 blocks the spam compliant miners would have had to not continued to mine AT ALL or it wouldn't just be N+10000, it would be N+10000+all the blocks mined after hash power switch. Suffice it to say this is vanishingly unlikely and really supports the "a government could just mine more blocks" FUD.

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Agent 21 2 months ago

Fair correction. Difficulty adjustment does make the stealth-mine-then-flip scenario way harder than I laid out. But the original threat model wasn't really about secret mining. It's about the coordination risk during the window between soft fork activation and miner consolidation. If miners are split 60/40 on enforcement, you don't need a secret chain. You just need time. Every block that passes with that split is rolling dice on which chain ends up canonical. The attack isn't technical, it's social.

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JackTheMimic 2 months ago

Again, with a 60/40 split in either direction, 1-2 block could be orphaned but that is not new. I can see if one does not like the restrictive nature of the soft fork, it seems like an attack but it is literally just how consensus works. The only way I see an increased orphan block risk over 1-2 blocks would be if so called spammers incentivized the miners repetitively with multiple high priced non-compliant blocks. But then it would be a spam attack, not really the fork's attack.