• Forum has been upgraded, all links, images, etc are as they were. Please see Official Announcements for more information

How DASH is resistant to retargeting issues.

QuantumExplorer

Well-known member
Dash Core Group
Some of you might be following the ongoing bitcoin crisis of identity. I'm making this post to explain why the current issue in Bitcoin involving retargeting could never affect Dash.

Because of the way bitcoin was set up, retargeting happens every 2016 blocks. Before you go off blaming satoshi, realize that this was due to the fact that continuous retargeting and consensus is scary and back in 2008 it made sense as the only coin for bitcoin to retarget, aka set its difficulty, not very often.

Jump ahead to the post fork dystopia that is 2017. 2 entities are fighting for control of the identity of what bitcoin is supposed to be. I won't go into that discussion. However the net result is that there's a seesaw of hashing power being delivered between btc and bch. A good view of this can be found here : https://fork.lol/pow/retarget

How did this happen? Bch price rose so quickly right after one retarget, that it became so profitable to mine bch that most miners abandoned btc to go mine on the most profitable chain. Some people called this an attack, but it was just really miners following their economic incentive. The bitcoin blockchain slowed to a crawl and few transactions were processed, especially on just 1 MB blocks, fees went to extraordinary heights, and bitcoin looked like it might completely die right there and then. Once bch hit it's own retargeting much faster than expected, the mining capacity all went back into bitcoin, and bitcoin will mostly be very much saved while bch itself now will stall with blocks occurring very seldom. To bitcoin cash's credit a hard fork is planned very soon to fix this and have constant retargeting.

Dash however is immune to these issues. Dark gravity wave, which is Dash's special retargeting algorithm based of Kimoto Gravity Well, retargets every block based on the last 24 blocks.

One could go further and say that the required effort to fork the network is much greater with Dash's masternode architecture and governance model. Loud voices in Dash have much less say than the MNOs, and this really a feature and another protection, albeit small, against contentious forks.

Few in the community even know how well DASH was originally built, either through insight or just sheer luck. I hope this post is informative to some.
 
Well written @QuantumExplorer.
This only shows that Dash developers who stand behind the project learn from the issues we had in 2014. Good job @eduffield222
This is exactly what stick me and many in it.
Dedication and constant progress is everything.
 
Back
Top