FTC Block Difficulty analysis 500 difficulty MHash "attack"

[AcidD]

Thanks @wrapper

what’s confusing me is…I can figure out how much hashrate was thrown at FTC

The below chart shows hashrate overlayed with difficulty and we can see the difficulty skyrocket but not the hashrate.

Maybe these were only switched on for very short amounts of time ? enough to affect network difficulty but not enough to show up in the Bitinfocharts graphs ?

[Wellenreiter]

The dashed line is the hash rate, which went up from ~ 1.4 GHash to 3.2 GHASh = +150%

The solid line is the difficulty, which went up from about 284 to ~ 600 = +110%

given the fact, that the difficulty is calculated based on an average of hashrate and also damped, and that the high hashrate peaks where relatively short, I think the difficulty reacted as designed.

@wrapper , please correct me, if I’m wrong

[AcidD]

am I stupid ? the dashed lines raise in my image is in june… ?

[Wellenreiter]

indeed it is june… ;)

you may need to change the time frame and duration ?

[AcidD]

@Wellenreiter said in FTC Block Difficulty analysis 500 difficulty MHash "attack":

indeed it is june… ;)

yu may need to change the time frame and duration ?

yay!! i’m not stupid.

Even zoomed in…

it doesn’t make sense that a hashrate of 1.85 Ghs would have difficulty 554

[wrapper]

@AcidD You are probably seeing the effect of different averages. That’s why I look at the actual difficulty.
The only way to calculate the hash rate is from the difficulty, which is calculated from the times of previous blocks.

[bsotnikow]

Great post! Thanks @wrapper

So assume the worst for a minute: someone privately has figured out ASIC mining neoscrypt and is planning a sustained attack?

What’s the contingency plan? I think i remember years back a discussion that if that ever were to happen, the devs would race to put together yet another unique algo to make it ASIC resistant again.

[AmDD]

@bsotnikow said in FTC Block Difficulty analysis 500 difficulty MHash "attack":

Great post! Thanks @wrapper

So assume the worst for a minute: someone privately has figured out ASIC mining neoscrypt and is planning a sustained attack?

What’s the contingency plan? I think i remember years back a discussion that if that ever were to happen, the devs would race to put together yet another unique algo to make it ASIC resistant again.

I understand trying to plan for the worst but my first thought here is why would someone do this? Developing an ASIC for NeoScrypt for the purpose of attack is foolish. ASICs are crazy expensive to develop and if used only to attack the network there is no recoup of that investment. The better option would be to develop it and mine all NeoScrypt coins for profit. Or sell the ASIC miners to the public.

[bsotnikow]

@AmDD This is all very true. But at some point as there are fewer and fewer surviving old coins, it’ll make sense for them to try and disable each other. Profitable not directly, but by disabling the “competition”. (or it may appear smart to do so and someone does it, i think these kinds of attacks would hurt trust in all coins tho and be stupid). There are a lot of unpredictable instantly now rich people out there, who knows what they might do.

Or a less nefarious situation. FTC price rises to the point where developing an ASIC miner does make sense. Just wondering if the long term goal is to remain a GPU-minable coin or if ASIC would be embraced?

[Wellenreiter]

@bsotnikow

while we don’t have another Asic resistant algorithm in our pockets, the philosophy behind Feathercoin is to keep the mining as distributed as posible, and therefore Asics won’t be embraced by the community or the developers

[bsotnikow]

@Wellenreiter Cool, thats what i thought. ASIC isn’t something i’d want to embrace for FTC either!