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rskip title description status purpose author layer complexity created
157
Cumulative Difficulty in JSON-RPC block responses
Draft
Usa
MP <mpicco@iovlabs.org>
Node
1
2020-02-11

Cumulative Difficulty in JSON-RPC block responses

RSKIP 157
Title Cumulative Difficulty in JSON-RPC block responses
Created 11-FEB-20
Author MP
Purpose Usa
Layer Node
Complexity 1
Status Draft

Abstract

The current RSKIP proposes cumulativeDifficulty as a new field to be added in the responses of existing JSON-RPC block methods. The value of this field is the sum of a block's difficulty plus its uncles' difficulties.

Motivation

The existing difficulty field in responses is defined as a magnitude indicating the effort required for a single miner to mine a single block for it to be added to the blockchain. However, this single value does not represent the total effort required by all miners in the network, since the block not only anchors to its parent, but to its uncles as well. We thus define the magnitude cumulativeDifficulty, which encompasses not only the block's difficulty, but its mined uncles' difficulty as well.

Due to multiple needs, such as forensics or statistics, we may sometimes need to make a reconstruction of the network hashrate evolution; in full, or for a subset period. Many of the former mentioned needs require cumulativeDifficulty for their calculation because it reflects the effort performed by all the miners (mainchain winning block and uncles).

JSON-RPC block methods do not provide the required information to calculate cumulativeDifficulty without requiring multiple interactions (querying for a block and all its uncles). Thus, we propose adding a cumulativeDifficulty field to the existing eth_getBlockX and eth_getUncleX responses.

Specification

The field cumulativeDifficulty is to be added to the following JSON-RPC block methods:

  • eth_getBlockByHash
  • eth_getBlockByNumber
  • eth_getUncleByBlockHashAndIndex
  • eth_getUncleByBlockNumberAndIndex

The following pseudo-code shows how the field is to be computed:

def cumulativeDifficulty(block):
    cumulativeDiff = block.difficulty
    
    for uncle in block.uncles:
        cumulativeDiff += uncle.difficulty

    return cumulativeDiff

Copyright

Copyright and related rights waived via CC0.