Ravencoin — From x16rV2 to KAWPOW Retrospective

It’s always good to look at what went well and what could’ve gone better after undergoing an in-flight engine swap.

The Good

The network transitioned from x16rV2 to KAWPOW without stopping. So the Ravencoin network still has 100% uptime from its genesis on Jan 3, 2018.

In this mining graph, you can see the transition. The network hash rate dropped significantly and is now climbing back up. The hashes are not equivalent and require more watts per hash, so don’t make the mistake of comparing these hashes to x16rV2 hashes or to Bitcoin’s SHA-256 hashes because they’re different.

Thank you to BitsBeTrippin for a video about the mining transition.

The last x16rV2 block was 1219735 with a difficulty of 451,360 and the first KAWPOW block was 1219736 with a diff of 256.

After 24 hours, the block count reached 1221675 with a diff of 49,371. Under normal circumstances, we would’ve reached block 1221176 in those 24 hours.

So there were about 500 “extra” blocks because of the difficulty guesstimate we made and the adjustment period. This does not mean there will be extra RVN, just that the first RVN halving event will happen about eight hours sooner. Unlike Satoshi Nakamoto’s poor advance planning, we choose to make…