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rskip title description status purpose author layer complexity created
290
Adjust Testnet block minimum difficulty
Adopted
Usa
AE (@adrian.eidelman)
Core
2
2021-11-18

Adjust Testnet block minimum difficulty

RSKIP 290
Title Adjust Testnet block minimum difficulty
Created 18-Nov-2021
Author AE
Purpose Usa
Layer Core
Complexity 2
Status Adopted

Abstract

This RSKIP proposes to increase the block minimum difficulty for RSK Testnet. It only impacts Testnet consensus rules, and has no impact in RSK Mainnet.

Motivation

According to RSK Testnet consensus rules, the network's minimum block difficulty will be decreased to a defined value (131,072) if no new blocks are mined for a period of 10 or more minutes. This is a safeguard against unusual increases in hashing power that, in general, drop off the network after some time (for example, this happens when a mining pool is doing tests on RSK Testnet but later switch that hashing power to RSK Mainnet), leaving the network with a block difficulty that can be high for software miners to find new blocks.

The goal of this improvement is to increase the predefined value to 550,000,000. The problem with the current value of 131,072 is that is too low, and even with regular software miners the amount of blocks produced is high until difficulty stabilizes, unnecessarily increasing the workload on the nodes of the network.

Specification

Minimum difficulty for Testnet is defined when Constants class is instantiated as shown in below snippet, extracted from rskj-core/src/main/java/org/ethereum/config/Constants.java file:

public static Constants testnet() {
        return new Constants(
                TESTNET_CHAIN_ID,
                false,
                14,
                new BlockDifficulty(BigInteger.valueOf(131072)),
                new BlockDifficulty(BigInteger.valueOf((long) 14E15)),
                BigInteger.valueOf(50),
                540,
                BridgeTestNetConstants.getInstance()
        );
    }

The 4th parameter needs to be set to the new value depending on the block number defined for hard fork activation (not yet defined).

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.