Incentivizing Accurate Timestamps with Continuous Target Adjustment

The target is the value in the block header that miners must find a hash below. In EarthBucks, the target adjusts moment by moment to keep the block time at 10 minutes.

This is different from Bitcoin, which has a target that adjusts every 2016 blocks. Bitcoin timestamps are valid if they are within two hours of the network time. This means some blocks have wildly inaccurate timestamps. And when the network hash rate adjusts, you have to wait a long time for the target to adjust.

In EarthBucks, a continuous target means the target depends on the current timestamp. Blocks from the future are ignored. Blocks from the past have the easiest target if they are produced right now. These factors combine to incentivize accurate timestamps. You don’t want to produce a block with a future timestamp, because it will be ignored. Nor do you want to produce a block with an old timestamp, because it will be hard to find a hash below the target. What you want is to produce a block with exactly the right timestamp.