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Move maximum timewarp attack threshold back to 600s from 7200s
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In 6bfa260 the testnet4 timewarp
attack fix block time variation was increased from the Great
Consensus Cleanup value of 600s to 7200s on the thesis that this
allows miners to always create blocks with the current time. Sadly,
doing so does allow for some nonzero inflation, even if not a huge
amount.

While it could be that some hardware ignores the timestamp provided
to it over Stratum and forces the block header timestamp to the
current time, I'm not aware of any such hardware, and it would also
likely suffer from random invalid blocks due to relying on NTP
anyway, making its existence highly unlikely.

This leaves the only concern being pools, but most of those rely on
work generated by Bitcoin Core (in one way or another, though when
spy mining possibly not), and it seems likely that they will also
not suffer any lost work. While its possible that a pool does
generate invalid work due to spy mining or otherwise custom logic,
it seems unlikely that a substantial portion of hashrate would do
so, making the difference somewhat academic (any pool that screws
this up will only do so once and the network would come out just
fine).

Further, while we may end up deciding these assumptions were
invalid and we should instead use 7200s, it seems prudent to try
with the value we "want" on testnet4, giving us the ability to
learn if the compatibility concerns are an issue before we go to
mainnet.
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TheBlueMatt committed Aug 13, 2024
1 parent 1a41e63 commit 16e95bd
Showing 1 changed file with 1 addition and 9 deletions.
10 changes: 1 addition & 9 deletions src/validation.cpp
Original file line number Diff line number Diff line change
Expand Up @@ -112,15 +112,7 @@ static constexpr int PRUNE_LOCK_BUFFER{10};
* block of a difficulty adjustment period is allowed to
* be earlier than the last block of the previous period (BIP94).
*/
static constexpr int64_t MAX_TIMEWARP{MAX_FUTURE_BLOCK_TIME};

/**
* If the timestamp of the last block in a difficulty period is set
* MAX_FUTURE_BLOCK_TIME seconds in the future, an honest miner should
* be able to mine the first block using the current time. This is not
* a consensus rule, but changing MAX_TIMEWARP should be done with caution.
*/
static_assert(MAX_FUTURE_BLOCK_TIME <= MAX_TIMEWARP);
static constexpr int64_t MAX_TIMEWARP = 600;

GlobalMutex g_best_block_mutex;
std::condition_variable g_best_block_cv;
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