Blockle 0.2.7 — the chain can't stall (quiet-lane difficulty decay)

Blockle 0.2.7 — the chain can't stall (quiet-lane difficulty decay)

This is a required update. It introduces a consensus rule that activates at block height 298. Older nodes/wallets will reject blocks from 298 onward and stop syncing — update to keep following the chain.

Why

When a mining lane's hashrate spikes and then leaves, LWMA can't retarget the difficulty back down — it only adjusts when a block is found. With no hashrate left at that difficulty, the lane (and with it the whole chain) freezes. This happened on mainnet: every lane went quiet and no block was produced for ~10 hours.

The fix

A time-based difficulty decay for quiet lanes. Once a lane has been silent past a grace window (2× its target spacing), the difficulty it demands of the next block halves once per target block-interval of overdue time, down to the minimum if needed. That caps the practical time between blocks: a lane that loses its hashrate always becomes mineable again instead of stalling the chain.

• Keys off the block's own timestamp, which consensus already bounds by median-time-past and the 2-hour future-drift cap, so it can't be gamed to force difficulty down faster than real elapsed time.
• Enforced from decay_activation_height (mainnet 298); all prior history validates unchanged.
• New unit + integration tests cover the decay, the grace window, and the pow-limit cap.

Also in this release: per-lane algorithm reporting so the pool site groups pools by their true algorithm, and the Rust crates are bumped (blockle 0.2.7, chain workspace 0.1.1 on crates.io).

Downloads

platform	wallet	CLI tools
Linux x86_64	BlockleWallet-linux-x86_64.zip	blockle-binaries-linux-x86_64.zip
Windows x64	BlockleWallet-windows-x86_64.zip	blockle-binaries-windows-x86_64.zip
macOS (Apple Silicon)	BlockleWallet-macos-arm64.zip	blockle-binaries-macos-arm64.zip

macOS builds are Apple Silicon only and are signed ad-hoc (not notarised) — if macOS says the app is "damaged," clear the quarantine flag: xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/BlockleWallet.app.