Rob, it seems like an attack could take place when Rosetta is down since you would let any miner mine on the blockchain. Is there a way to fix that?
I thought about the rule and realized we have to make a distinction between Rosetta going down and Rosetta rewards stopping vs Heat mining ramifications. Let me coin the term "DR" (Disaster Recovery mode, when Rosetta is down), which btw is probably only going to happen once every 2 years for one day - its if they bring their network down for upgrades, anyway, let us assume we are in DR.
In DR mode, this is 24 hours after Rosetta stops accepting work units, our SanctuaryQuorum will not come to a consensus. They will all have a filehash of 0x0, and will not vote for a consensus. This means when the superblock hits, it will reward 0 Research payments. Heat mining will continue however.
In DR mode, our CPID signature rule will still be in effect, for existing CPIDs. So the security is still there, because CPID DCC's are still signed in the chain. So really nothing changes (except researchers are not getting paid Daily Research Payments, everyone is just mining for 600 BBP heat rewards). This is because the wallet still knows the existing magnitude, prior payments, and signed cpids, so they can keep heat mining (The rule is written to go back to the *last* DC superblock that was actually Paid), hence the reason it is going to always access the last researcher set (for heat mining rules).
Even if we were in DR mode for 6 months, and lets assume the wallet loses records of all signed CPIDs, we would then revert to 30 minute blocks (as the blocks would Lag because the wallet is trying to enforce the CPID rules), but there would not truly be a "security emergency", instead it would be as it is now: random researchers hashing with DGW as our diff algorithm. It would be slightly less secure but by then we would be issuing a mandatory upgrade to fix whatever broke down in PODC (Maybe entire BOINC network upgraded the protocol etc).
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