What on earth caused such a diff spike around 10k on March 12th?

[yidakee]

What the heck was this all about? Some sort of test to DGW's resilience? Or someone in the know testing something out?
This kind of thing do freak me out a little I confess...

 

[chaeplin]

That was KGW.

 

[yidakee]

you mean a hard fork to DGW?

 

[chaeplin]

you mean a hard fork to DGW?

After that spike(KGW used, 2014/03/12), Evan implemented DGW version #1.
(2014/03/15, https://github.com/evan82/darkcoin/commit/07c99052edc617975cdcbe4482e02c52e2d1fbf5)

Check this. Darkcoin KGW history.
http://drk.poolhash.org/KGW1.html

 

[yidakee]

So let me see if I got this straight... there was a spike, and the developer forked to accommodate DGW, and took care of a sudden rush of hash power?

 

[chaeplin]

KGW implemented to mitigate hash whale.
But KGW has TW exploits. It caused 10K difficulty.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.msg5705503#msg5705503

I'm really happy with my current implementation of DGW, it seems to be vastly improved over KGW. It uses multiple exponential moving averages and a simple moving average to smoothly adjust the difficulty. We've had huge fluctuations in testnet and it's dealt with everything perfectly.

This implementation also fixes all known exploits with KGW, so no more 10k+ difficulty blocks out of nowhere.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=421615.0

 

[fra55]

Thank you for the explanation