One fundamental guideline is that a miner will not mine on a block if its timestamp is more than 7200 seconds (or 2 hours) ahead of the miner's local time. Instead, the miner will work on the parent of that block until their local clock has advanced sufficiently. This practice ensures that miners use their local time for block timestamps, inherently imposing a self-enforced 2-hour Past Time Limit (PTL) on their mining activities. Such a mechanism naturally prevents miners from assigning a timestamp to a new block that is significantly out of sync with the parent block's timestamp.

The current regulatory framework does not explicitly enforce these first two principles. However, it's conceivable to implement a system where compliance with the second rule could be verified by leveraging the proof of work (PoW) as an overriding validation mechanism, albeit this remains a theoretical consideration for now. In the absence of direct enforcement of the second rule, the third rule acts as a practical check on miner honesty. It posits that blocks can be validated based on whether they adhere to the expected timestamp limitations, effectively requiring that every block maintains a 2-hour PTL in relation to its parent. This is not introducing an additional rule but rather ensuring that blocks which evidently violate the first two guidelines are deemed invalid.

For implementation, this approach implies that all miners, and by extension, nodes within the network, would recognize a block as invalid if its timestamp is more than 7200 seconds earlier than its parent block. This recognition is based on the understanding that such a block could not have been created following the established rules. Consequently, miners would identify the most recent invalid block—provided it appeared after the introduction of this validation rule—and commence mining on the parent block of the identified invalid block. The subsequent chain leading from this parent block would then be considered invalid due to the violation by the initial child block. In scenarios where multiple valid chains exist, the one stemming from the parent block with the highest cumulative work would be prioritized for further mining efforts. This system ensures the temporal integrity of the blockchain while promoting a consensus on the validity of the sequence of blocks, thereby upholding the principle of chronological accuracy and honesty among miners.