Topic: [Opinions] IF you could improve/add/remove 1 thing to bitcoin what would it be? - page 3. (Read 5702 times)

I wish blocks were 1 minute apart, not 10.

Better anonymity and privacy tools/ protocols (I think these will come, though, just not there yet)

In the majority of cases, waiting for confirmations is a waste of time. The difficulty in pulling off a double-spend is so convoluted and tricky, I don't think waiting for confirmations is worth it unless you're dealing with huge inter-bank or inter-business transfers. I've made purchases with Bitcoin about a dozen times now, and each time only took a few seconds. I think the longest transaction was about 7 seconds. Most were practically instantaneous.

The most critical in my opinion: Address the 1 MB blocksize limit to allow Bitcoin to scale.

My improvement:

With a typical company, you *never* have the developers making *product* decisions.  There's a reason for that.  They have absolutely zero clue what the *market* needs.  With Bitcoin you've got a bunch of non product / sales / marketing people (also known as developers) making decisions on the direction of the software development.  

This is a huge problem.  These guys aren't economists.  Yet they're creating a potential new world economy.  These guys don't have the first clue what the market needs, aside from what they may have gleaned in conversations/articles/podcasts.  And its exactly why developers like Gavin seem to think its just fine to "add that feature later, when we need it" (faster transaction times).  

That's just one of many important enhancements that are on the "We'll get to it in 5 years" list.  The developers have reflected an inability to grasp the fact that the financial industry is evaluating bitcoin and what it can (can't) do *right now*, for products they would like to build "later".  If they see a limited protocol now, a huge opportunity is lost.  

This is one of the pitfalls of a project that is decentralized, and has zero product plan guiding its direction.  Product Development people shouldn't touch the code.  And Developers shouldn't be playing the role of Product Development.

-B-

I don't think that the price is affected by the difficulty of mining but rather the opposite that the difficulty is affected by the price of bitcoin. If difficulty decreases or increases then the same amount of coins will still be mined on average. However if the price changes then the amount of funds that can be gained from using resources for mining would be changed in the same direction.

I agree. It is even less than 20 minutes usually and they are still working to keep improving.

Fees are optional.

I would decrease the time for difficulty adjustments.  I don't have a specific duration in mind, but maybe something like every 1-3 days.

My reasoning for this is that I think it could have interesting effects on price stability due to reduced effects of difficulty manipulation and speculation by miners.  I think there's a likelihood that it could help stabilize the rate at which miners sell BTC to recoup investment costs.

For the record, I kind of have no idea what I'm talking about here.

Here is my suggestion:

Replace mining with DPOS, thereby relieving us of the need to inflate the coin supply at 10%/annum in order to pay for miners.

I want to be rewarded for holding an asset, not penalized with inflation. BTSX has got the right idea.

would probably change the fees so that even smaller amounts can be sent without large fees. If bitcoin gets more expensive, you could have to pay several dollars to send one dollar of bitcoin.

This would also make a 0/unconfirmed transaction much less secure. Now with the network hashrate as high as it is today it would take a lot of resources to mine the next block with any kind of certainty so the chances of a nefarious party mining to launch a double spend attack is low for most smaller to mid sized transactions as long as the TX fee is sufficient. However if the block time was less then the cost to potential reward ratio would be much greater for a potential attacker. 

What about shorter block times resulting in less time for double spends to occur? Isn't this an advantage? Once the transactions are confirmed in the blockchain, they are confirmed and no longer able to be double spent. Right? So, that would seem to be an advantage for a shorter block time.  (Even so, I am not advocating a change in the block times. I think Bitcoin is good enough the way it is. Leave shorter block times to alt coins.)

But then most people would ask for at lest 3 or 4 confs. before accepting a transaction, so no big improvement.

The reason the block confirmation time is as long as it is now is because shorter confirmation times would mean there would be too many orphaned blocks and orphaned chains. Even if you had a 3 minute confirmation, having 4 of these confirmations would be much less secure then one 10 minute confirmation. Also for most smaller transactions, a 0/unconfirmed transaction is generally secure as long as it is properly propagated throughout the network and contains a sufficient TX fee.

10 minutes are too long, I would modify the transaction time to 3-4 minutes.

but not in all countries, there are still many who have not been there
example of my country as well not exist, the new plan would set up 2 pieces bitcoi ATM in the capital center

there are two things important, but i would certainly reduce the transaction time, and the reason is obvious we live in a world that aim to make everything always faster, bitcoin is no exception

^ I share this viewpoint.

But then I realized one factor that makes faster transaction times an actual improvement:  Once a bitcoin spend is actually confirmed in a block on the blockchain, this then prevents a double spend from occurring. So, the longer the block times (i.e. 10 minutes on average), the more opportunity for double spends. If block times were set to 60 seconds for example, then the potential criminal attemping to do a double spend would only have an average of 60 seconds to do so.

If it wasn't for this one factor then there would be no reason to speed up block times because what you said is true.

The question is: what is the optimal block time, and does changing this figure actually offer enough benefit to make the change worthwhile. It would be a huge fork. block rewards would have to change too because they would happen every minute instead of every 10 minutes. So instead of getting 25BTC per block, you'd get only 2.5 BTC per block. Honestly, this kind of change seems too drastic to occur to me. I accept bitcoin for how it is now, and just understand how the technology works so I don't get screwed over. Education is always going to be a part of using any digital currency.

Multi sig exists which is somewhat like that