This does something interesting to the incentives surrounding hard forks. If someone wants to hard fork e.g., ETH, they either (1) need to abandon ethash altogether for a different hashing function, or (2) be very very certain that their hard fork will capture a large fraction of the hash power of the original chain. Otherwise the forked coin can be targeted as soon as it's created.
And of course the new coin needs to maintain its share of that hashpower indefinitely to survive.
This seems like a bad thing, since it weakens the implicit threat of hard forking that keeps BDFLs in (non crypto) open source projects from acting too strongly against community consensus.
And of course the new coin needs to maintain its share of that hashpower indefinitely to survive.
This seems like a bad thing, since it weakens the implicit threat of hard forking that keeps BDFLs in (non crypto) open source projects from acting too strongly against community consensus.