Can a large miner manipulate Kaspa's difficulty adjustment?

Researchers identified that a new large miner joining the network could suppress sampled blocks, preventing the network from correctly adjusting to the added mining difficulty. Difficulty adjustment is the mechanism that keeps block production roughly steady as mining power enters or leaves the network — it works by sampling recently produced blocks to gauge current conditions. If a large miner suppresses those samples, the network gets a distorted reading and cannot respond accurately. The Kaspa development team analyzed several potential fixes and ultimately documented the chosen solution as KIP4, a dedicated Kaspa Improvement Proposal, because the approach was sufficiently different from earlier proposals to deserve its own specification. This matters for beginners because it shows Kaspa's protocol is actively hardened against real attacks, not just theoretical ones.