Why 10 min block mining? - page 2. | Bitcointalksearch.org

kaggie

sr. member

Activity: 333

Merit: 507

Quote from: BlackHatCoiner on March 29, 2022, 10:56:21 AM

That's also a spooky coincidence:

Quote from: https://twitter.com/Andrew_J_Howard/status/1503047318123134978

January 9th, 1988:
The Economist publishes ..

Which is, by the way, another Britain weekly newspaper.

Cool.

Imagine if we ever have a solar currency, then we will have to increase the block time and a bitcoin based currency will be the only one available.

It takes 12 - 22 minutes for light to reach Mars from Earth. It takes light from the sun about 10 minutes to reach Earth.

10 minutes is probably just a 'good time'. Most things take ten minutes long. "Just ten more minutes!" is a common expression. It's an appropriate amount of time to see what's going on and to respond as a normal human person, but not too long that you have to wait for much longer. It's a good amount of time for being able to debug, simulate, or have a presentation with the important facts.

Quote from: bill gator on March 29, 2022, 10:39:17 AM

and all of the other numerology that surrounds our cult.

There are so many ridiculous numbers. People will find patterns in anything. Some of those patterns may mean something, and others may mean nothing.

garlonicon

copper member

Activity: 821

Merit: 1992

Quote

Can't we just make it quicker and reduce the rewards appropriately?

You can, P2Pool did just that, they reduced it 20 times, reaching 30 seconds per block.

BlackHatCoiner

legendary

Activity: 1512

Merit: 7340

Farewell, Leo

Quote from: bill gator on March 29, 2022, 10:39:17 AM

Quicker blocks is less stability, slower blocks is less convenient - one can only hope there was purpose behind 10-minute blocks, 21,000,000 bitcoins, the year 2140 and all of the other numerology that surrounds our cult.

There's nothing odd with the 10 minutes interval. It's the best trade-off in efficiency, security and simplicity. The 21,000,000 was rather probably the only arbitrary choice. I like thinking there's a correlation with this:

Quote from: Anonymous

42 is the Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything.

That's also a spooky coincidence:

Quote from: https://twitter.com/Andrew_J_Howard/status/1503047318123134978

January 9th, 1988:
The Economist publishes "Get ready for a world currency".

January 9th, 2009:
#Bitcoin block 1 is mined.

21 years later, to the exact day

Which is, by the way, another Britain weekly newspaper.

bill gator

legendary

Activity: 1386

Merit: 1123

This has been a discussion in the community ever since the idea of mass-adoption was brought up. This has been the cause of forks, fights and frustration throughout the years and I don't think there will ever be a perfect solution.

Quicker blocks is less stability, slower blocks is less convenient - one can only hope there was purpose behind 10-minute blocks, 21,000,000 bitcoins, the year 2140 and all of the other numerology that surrounds our cult.

BlackHatCoiner

legendary

Activity: 1512

Merit: 7340

Farewell, Leo

Reducing the 10 minutes block interval, which rewards with 6.25 BTC to, say, 1 minute block interval, which rewards with 0.625 BTC isn't the same security-wise. The reason is that the network works asynchronously. Propagation takes some time, and if two miners solve the same block, we call one of those a "stale block".

Therefore, the less the interval the more the chances to have stale blocks. Quoting this excellent post which describes it better:

Quote from: ?? on ??

But we still have stale blocks with a frequency of somewhere around 0.1% with a block time of 10 minutes. Decreasing that to 1 minute would increase the number of stale blocks exponentially.

The probability of finding a block in time x is given by the equation 1 - e^(-x/y), where y is the expected block time. If we take x = 10 and y = 600, then the chances of finding a block with 10 seconds currently is around 1.65%. If you drop the block time to a minute and make y = 60, then that chance increases to 15.35%. That's a huge increase in stale blocks and a huge increase in wasted hash power.

thirdprize

sr. member

Activity: 485

Merit: 274

What was the logic behind taking 10 mins to mine a block? Was it by design or accident? Anything that wants to be used as money needs at least sub minute, preferably sub second blocks. Unless it was intended for batch processing over night. Can't we just make it quicker and reduce the rewards appropriately?

Topic: Why 10 min block mining? - page 2. (Read 468 times)