Is the impending Hard Fork causing SiaCoin's rise in price today?
I guess it is a good thing to keep an eye on Twitter and maybe go to a coins forum to catch important details.
After I caught a tweet, I went to the Reddit link and got some more information.
We released v1.3.0 right around the time we decided to pursue ASICs for Sia. Unfortunately, Sia's difficulty adjustment algorithm at the time was very unstable, and unable to survive the introduction of ASICs. It caused problems early in the life of Sia, and had the potential to cause problems later as well.
The core issue was an error in the way the difficulty adjustment was calculated. Every 500 blocks, the difficulty adjustment was calculated based on how long it took the last 1,000 blocks to be created, and then the difficulty adjusted in response to the number being more or less than 10,000 minutes.
This is actually the wrong way to do it, and causes significant oscillations in difficulty. They tend to smooth out over time, but they smooth out slowly, and a sudden influx of hashrate could cause oscillations to last months, creating a block time that's sometimes 2-3 minutes (for a few days), and other times 20-40 minutes (for a few weeks).
The change in block 135,000 switches to a new difficulty adjustment algorithm. Instead of adjusting every 500 blocks, we adjust every block. To prevent a certain type of selfish mining, we adjust using the timestamp of the previous block, not the current block. We use an exponential decay to calculate the current hashrate, and then we adjust the difficulty based on that estimate. Then finally there is a rebalancing component, where if the average block time recently has been 7 or 8 minutes, we target a block time of 10.1 or 10.2 minutes to slowly bring the overall average block time back to exactly 10 minutes. Similarly, if the recent average block time has been 11 or 12 minutes, we target a block time of 9.9 or 9.8 minutes to slowly bring the overall average block time back to 10 minutes.
The hardfork we are introducing probably should have been introduced much earlier in the life of the network, but became absolutely necessary when we realized we would be introducing a potentially >10x increase to the hashrate as we started looking at ASICs. The instability caused by that combined with the existing difficulty adjustment algorithm would have probably caused a lot of people to lose their files, not to mention would have caused large transaction backlogs and other issues that impact miners, exchanges, renters, and hosts.
Happy to answer any questions about the upcoming hardfork. You can typically look for changes in the code by grepping the modules/consensus folder for '135e3' and for 'OakHardforkBlock'.
I also found the main blogpost on Medium.
Reminder: Upcoming Sia Hardfork
When does the hardfork trigger?
The hardfork triggers at block 135,000 which is estimated to be mined on Wednesday the 6th of December.
The latest twitter post has moved this date out to December 16.
For those of you with coins in the exchanges and paper wallets, it should be fine.
There is no bonus for holding Sia, so you won't see an increase of coin or anything.
However, it looks like mining for Sia will soon be unprofitable, so I guess people will switch to just trading it, which makes it more limited and possibly more valuable.
SiaCoin still up 20+% on the USDollar and BitCoin right now.
Let the positive energy sing!
More Power to the Minnows!!
