Can miners manipulate Kaspa timestamps to lower mining difficulty?

Yes, timestamp manipulation is a known attack vector, but Kaspa's design makes it both costly and only mildly effective. A miner with a wider timestamp flexibility window has more room to submit skewed timestamps, potentially tricking the network into thinking blocks are arriving slower than they are and nudging difficulty downward. Kaspa counters this by keeping the difficulty window far longer than the timestamp flexibility window — currently 2,641 seconds versus 263 seconds — so any manipulation is diluted across a much longer history of blocks. As the source notes, an optimal attack would require a lot of resources and luck to apply consistently, while only affecting the network mildly.