TimeTravel gets upgraded with Warp Drive!

Hey Machinists,

Today, we are happy to announce that we have merged a new algorithm to help process stuck blocks that have been stalling your transactions.

Warp Drive is the newest addition to TimeTravel. Warp Drive progressively lowers the difficulty of blocks if they are not solved in certain amounts of time. Each difficulty reduction will return a new difficulty when requested, even before the current block is solved. This feature enables Machinecoin to help it’s miners process stuck blocks.

Warp Drive’s logic is when a block is not solved within 300 seconds, the network will drop the difficulty by 20% (~ *0.79). Then every 150 seconds, it drops an additional 10% until the block is solved (i.e. second adjustment is decreased by >10% ( ~ *0.86), third by ~ * 0.85, fourth ~ *0.84, …). For example, after 30 minutes of an unmined block, the accumulative adjustments will equal ~0.76 of the previous adjustment. Although not likely, a correctly solved block submitted at the original difficulty will be accepted as well.

Testing of the algorithm has provided promising results. In one successful test, ~12Mh/s was placed on the testnet. It was immediately raised to ~200Mh/s by volunteers from the community, and then immediately removed. Afterwards, it took ~15 minutes at ~12Mh/s to process the next block. Within 30 minutes from the onset of the simulated attack, the blocks were processing steadily at 2.5 minutes

Warp Drive works hand in hand with TimeTravel, which was designed for ASIC resistance.

We know you are all excited about the upcoming masternodes release, as are we. We sincerly hoped to be integrating masternodes in this release, however the mining algorithm upgrade was necessary to stabilize the network, and it took priority over new features. Masternode coding is currently active, and will be completed in the coming weeks. If unforseen issues arise from Warp Drive, the functionality of the network will take priority over masternodes.

This release will be enabling SegWit as well, and is a mandatory release. Please update your client to v0.14.3 located at https://github.com/machinecoin-project/machinecoin-core/releases/tag/v0.14.3.

The new difficulty retargeting algorithm will take effect at block number 468505.

Sincerly,

~The Machinecoin Team