In the post about the Rewards Transaction I mentioned that requiring miners to sign rewards transactions is unique to Contractless blockchain.
Well that requirement goes hand in hand with another unique feature we have called Fairness Difficulty.
Fairness difficulty is a simple concept. Every 840,000 blocks, the difficulty decreases by 1 starting at 10. It stops decreasing when 1 is reached which happens at the same time as the first halving event.
This number defines how many blocks in a row the same miner can mine. Because the miner is required to sign the rewards transaction, they can't simply plug in someone elses wallet address to avoid this.
What this calculation actually does is starts at 10 and every time a block is mined, it checks who the miner was for the last 10 blocks. If the miner was the same as the current miner for all 10 blocks, the block is rejected.
Each interval when it decreases, it checks that many blocks - so first 10, then 9, then 8, etc.
By the time of the first halving event, no miner should be able to mine 2 blocks consecutively. So every time a miner mines a block, someone else must mine the next block for that miner to continue mining.
The goal of this is to make mining a touch more fair for those who may not always be on the top hardware so they might still have a chance at mining a block.
Also although it will likely have minimal effect it would be nice if this made mining just a touch less centralized.
In any event this is what the fairness distribution is all about and how it works.