Adaptive Proof of Work (APoW)

• From this post by Komodo (10-2019):

"Komodo’s Lead Developer James ‘jl777’ Lee implemented a solution to the Diff Strand Attack called Adaptive Proof of Work (APoW). As the name suggests, this variation of Proof of Work allows a blockchain’s network to adapt to sudden and substantial changes in hash rate. In fact, with APoW, a blockchain network can adjust the difficulty target within a single block

There are three main components to this new variation on Proof of Work: timestamp protection, block-to-block stair-stepping, and N*N difficulty adjustments."

All three components are explained in more detail in the article itself.

"The test chain created to test APoW was aptly titled ADAPT and it was spawned on July 31, 2019. Kolo, Decker, MrLynch, and SHossain all participated in testing the new APoW implementation. "

About the testing on APoW, Komodo’s Lead Dev jl777 wrote:

"We just did a mining attack test to validate the Adaptive Proof of Work (APoW). We boosted the difficulty to 1.2 million and now have a single CPU trying to mine it back to normal. Of course, that would be impossible without APoW, but with it, even a 1 million diff stranding can be recovered from. Blocks come in clumps of six after a gap of 13+ minutes. At a difficulty of one million, the first gap was almost 30 minutes, but as the diff drops over the hours, the network will produce a batch of six blocks every 15 minutes or so. I predict within a day (instead of 10 years!) APoW will get a diff stranded chain back to normal."