What is “hash power flash”?

As we all know, Bitcoin produces one block in about 10 minutes, so how does Bitcoin keep producing blocks every 10 minutes? It turns out that the difficulty can be automatically adjusted in the Bitcoin program, every 2016 blocks. By calculating the average block production time of the previous 2016 blocks and combining the difficulty value, the current network computing power is calculated. If the block production is fast, the difficulty is increased; otherwise, the difficulty is reduced. In short, the block production time can be stabilized at about 10 minutes.

However, the system is adjusted every 2016 blocks, which takes about 14 days. This brings certain mining risks. The system cannot reflect the current real computing power. If the adjustment is not timely, it is easy to suffer from "computing power flash". The so-called "computing power flash" means that the computing power fluctuates up and down, resulting in drastic fluctuations in block time, which has a huge impact on the system.

For example, if the price of the currency plummets and the miners cannot make ends meet, a large number of Bitcoin mining machines will stop mining, and the computing power of the entire network will also drop significantly. Bitcoin needs 2016 blocks to adjust once, and at this time, the block output will be slow, which will often aggravate the congestion of Bitcoin and seriously damage the vitality of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash (BCH) and BSV have the same origin and all use the SHA256 algorithm. Bitcoin mining machines can switch back and forth between them. If the price of one of their coins fluctuates drastically in the short term, making it more profitable to mine one of them, it will lead to a transfer of computing power, further exacerbating the fluctuation of computing power and making the block time more unstable. Once there is no block for a long time and it is unprofitable, miners will stop mining. In serious cases, there is a risk of destroying the currency.

To prevent this situation, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), which has a smaller computing power, has adopted a dynamic adjustment mechanism for mining difficulty, shortening the adjustment time of mining difficulty. It adjusts once every 144 blocks (about one day), and the difficulty will be reduced if there is no block for a long time. However, due to the frequent reduction of mining difficulty, the overall block speed of BCH has been ahead of Bitcoin (BTC) by a lot, and it will now halve earlier than Bitcoin.

Bitcoin has a relatively large computing power. Since its total computing power is very high, the risk of computing power flash is not great, but it should not be underestimated. Whether the future development of Bitcoin will modify certain rules, we still have to wait and see.

Official account: 1TMine computing power platform

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