Anti Bot Net (ABN) was a feature in BiblePay that required any miner to stake 125k BBP (aged 1 day) to successfully mine a block. The idea was that any new miner would need to stake BBP. This prevents botnets from joining the network at will. Now that ABN is turned off, anyone can mine the blockchain even with 0 BBP. Turning off ABN has allowed BiblePay to have an external CPU miner and even pool software based on NOMP.

I asked:

Does BBP have a max time between blocks? I recall PoDC 1.0 had a 1 hour maximum block time. I’ve been noticing some very long wait times between blocks since we got off anti-bot net (ABN). Blocks per day fluctuates more now. Does difficulty allowed to mine the block drop after a certain time? Does the pool handle this too, or this is only solo mining?

((image courtesy of https://grepblock.com/))

Rob said on BitcoinTalk:

We still have a late block threshhold of one hour.  (I’m really, really glad we put that in, because that is what gave Rapture a disconcerting time when the chain froze).  What happens is after 60 minutes, the block becomes 80% easier to mine.

It works on both pools and solo.

I realize we have had the variation; we are doing a couple things to rectify this over the long term.  For one the next version has the ‘masterclock’ command that will allow us to see how far off our clock has drifted since inception.  The other thing is I’ve been discussing a Part A & B miner with MIP, but I haven’t had much time to post the spec.  I believe this idea offers some pretty good pros, and whats really nice about it is it works with ChainLocks and is fork proof.  This part would be a game changer, so I think we should discuss this further once I release the spec (as it makes the time drift a moot point).  I’m not inferring btw that BiblePay is going to replace POBH with a new algorithm.  Im just inferring that we will release a spec that shows how we can perform useful work on the main chain without forks by extending POBH.  Its also pool compatible so we can keep nomp in place, and its exchange compatible.  The part that I’m still working on is a dotnet proof of concept for “Part B”.  I need to test this end to end before I can release the spec.