The difficulty can adjust up to a factor of 4 in either direction. If they activated with 1% of the hashrate (and they maintained the same hashrate indefinitely), they’d take about 200 weeks to reach the first difficulty adjustment, then 50 weeks to reach the next, then 12.5 weeks to reach the third, then 3.125 weeks for the fourth, then they’d be back to 10 minute blocks. So, it would only take an expected 265.625 weeks or slightly over 5 years to get back to the normal block cadence. — Good thing many RDTS proponents seem to be open to a blockspace reduction. ;)
Mandatory signaling starting at the beginning of a difficulty period is pretty detrimental to a soft fork attempt with such low hashrate support. A bunch of RDTS proponents have lately been mentioning that they’d be open to “firing the miners if the majority of them is malicious”, so it sounds like they are seeding support for a proof-of-work change when their mandatory signaling period goes as poorly as expected.
The difficulty can adjust up to a factor of 4 in either direction. If they activated with 1% of the hashrate (and they maintained the same hashrate indefinitely), they’d take about 200 weeks to reach the first difficulty adjustment, then 50 weeks to reach the next, then 12.5 weeks to reach the third, then 3.125 weeks for the fourth, then they’d be back to 10 minute blocks. So, it would only take an expected 265.625 weeks or slightly over 5 years to get back to the normal block cadence. — Good thing many RDTS proponents seem to be open to a blockspace reduction. ;)
Mandatory signaling starting at the beginning of a difficulty period is pretty detrimental to a soft fork attempt with such low hashrate support. A bunch of RDTS proponents have lately been mentioning that they’d be open to “firing the miners if the majority of them is malicious”, so it sounds like they are seeding support for a proof-of-work change when their mandatory signaling period goes as poorly as expected.