Superblocks

Riecoin proposed with its first hard fork a superblocks system, featuring every week a much harder than usual block (the superblock) to solve every week. Its aim is to beat more easily 6-tuple world records. The 144 blocks before and 143 blocks after it are in the other hand a bit easier to compensate. The superblock and the 287 surrounding it have rewards adjusted to respectively 694.66666666 RIC (as the superblock is about 27.78 times harder to find) and 22.66666666 RIC instead of 25 RIC (1389.33333333 and 45.33333333 when the normal reward was 50 RIC), so the average reward remain the normal one.

The Riecoin network hardforked at Block 160704 (November 17, 2014) and the first superblock is Block 160848. Subsequent ones have a Block Height of the form $160848+4032n$ or $(39+n)\times <!--\; \times \; -->4032+3600$, until the 328th at Block 1479312 as the superblocks system was removed in the second fork.

While records have indeed been broken this way, it also has significant drawbacks, like freezing the network during an hour or even several every week, complicating critical parts of the code, or confusing a lot of people, asking again and again why the rewards are lowered or why the miner suddenly mines much slower. Since the fork, there is the possibility of looking for longer tuples than required and break records this way, since 7-tuples can be part of longer ones.