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I would like to create a blockchain network which will stay at the same level of complexity, is such a thing possible?

Thanks

Eliahu Horwitz
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There is nothing preventing you from creating a cryptocurrency that has a fixed difficulty, however it'd not be very useful.

The difficulty in Bitcoin serves the simple purpose of ensuring that the money creation process and the confirmation process follows a predictable schedule of once every 10 minutes. If we were to fix the difficulty, then the network could not react to the influx or reduction of computational resources. So when new mining hardware joins the network the expected time between blocks would reduce, while when hardware leaves, the time between blocks lengthens. This has two effects:

  • The introduction of new currency to the network becomes unpredictable, i.e., when people join the network currency gets created faster and faster, resulting in a hyper-inflation. Financial systems heavily rely on predictability of the money supply.
  • The confirmation times are unpredictable, which is bad when people start leaving the network, we'd wait longer and longer for confirmations. On the other side, people joining the network also has adverse effects, since blocks do not have time to be propagated in the network, resulting in blockchain forks, which in turn undermines the reassurance we get from a confirmation.

Realistically speaking, there is no upside of fixing a difficulty. If you're a user, you'd get the same number of blocks (not really since they'd be stale due to blockchain forks most of the time), but the coins you'd be mining are worthless because everybody else also gets a fixed amount for their investment. And on the other side the system would be hardly usable at all.

cdecker
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  • Thank you very much, my question was wrongly put. I was meaning to ask if I could create a blockchain which regardless of the computing power put into mining will release a block on a scheduled pace. You have answered it. Thanks – Eliahu Horwitz Jun 16 '17 at 14:15
  • Oh, yeah, that's a good question. With PoW it is rather hard to have a fixed schedule, since PoW is inherently a random process (otherwise everybody would just sit there for 9 minutes idling and then start mining just for that one second that will produce a block). It's also a problem from control theory to optimize the retargeting interval: too small and we overreact to small changes or luck, too large and we distance ourselves too much from the actual value. Glad I could help though ^^ – cdecker Jun 16 '17 at 14:24