A Paypal transaction takes 6 months to confirm.
That I call extremely inconvenient.
Topic: Question about block generation (Read 1135 times)
It is arbitrary but it is a reasonable tradeoff between confirmation time and network consistency. If the blocks were created every minute or so, there will be a lot of "collisions", situations where blocks are created at almost the same time that result in the chain fork. Now, the chain forks are rare.
I am wondering why blocks are generated only once every 10 or so minutes. Why not halve or quarter the time it takes to generate a block and lower the reward by the same amount so that transactions can be confirmed faster? I feel like the confirmation of transactions is currently the weakest part of bitcoins, and that it makes them extremely inconvenient if they ever become a currency used in real life transactions.
Jump to: