Where are all these orphans coming from? It's becoming harder to believe that it's entirely due to the 1 minute block times .. maybe that combined with the incredible mining speed increases we have now changes a few things...?
There are a number of factors which contribute to orphans but they all stem ultimately from the one minute block time, which just too fast for an ad-hoc p2p type network. If you were running a centrally managed financial backbone (or you want to turn a coin into one) then you can probably optimize everything such that one minute blocks mostly work. But for a decentralized peer-to-peer system, it doesn't work.
If you look at these coins, Monero (1 min) generally has the most orphans and Duck (4 min) the least, though this of course varies according to network conditions. Probably closer to 4 minutes might be right, given the high cost of verification. 2 minutes is the bare minimum.
However, I would add that orphans really aren't as bad as they seem. The block target is determined by the rate of
accepted blocks. If there weren't orphans the difficulty would be correspondingly higher. Everything comes out about the same, except more overhead and other secondary factors which aren't great and should be addressed by increasing the block time and optimizing the code in other ways. But it really isn't a "waste" of hashes or anything like that.
