Self-orphaning

by Brown, Saturday, June 13, 2020, 08:45 (540 days ago) @ BlakeKeiller

I've stopped staking now too. Looking into it, it's clear that there was a transition from pure proof of burn to a combination with proof of stake after 32 blocks, since that is when the first staking rewards matured for staking. These staking rewards quickly overwhelmed the burns making staking of new blocks very easy. Difficulty adjustment seems to only make things only about 2% more difficult per block. Meanwhile each block a new 25 bar reward became mature for staking. If there were, say, less than 1000 bars staking, this means each block the amount of staking assets increased by more than 2.5%, so the difficulty adjustment couldn't keep up.

While this would eventually resolve itself (presumably) once the amount of staking assets was high enough, I think it's worth considering doing an emergency hard fork. You could modify the way staking assets are counted to make the transition to proof of stake happen more smoothly.