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Title: More blocks per week, less generated per block... Why not? Post by: Man From The Future on June 10, 2011, 09:10:31 PM Would it not be better if there were more blocks found per week, but each = less generated bitcoins? As then shopping quickly could be faster - things would be confirmed more easily.
What're the technical reasons against this? Shopping IRL using bitcoins (mobile phone), would be more safe with this, would it not? Plese explain away my beliefs about this! :P Title: Re: More blocks per week, less generated per block... Why not? Post by: theymos on June 10, 2011, 09:16:22 PM Shopping could not be completed faster. If blocks were found twice as fast, then it would take 12 blocks for a transaction to confirm, as each block would be worth half as much.
Title: Re: More blocks per week, less generated per block... Why not? Post by: Man From The Future on June 10, 2011, 09:51:59 PM Oh, thanks! :)
Don't know why I was treating 6 as a limit set in stone, when it is obviously relative... :P Title: Re: More blocks per week, less generated per block... Why not? Post by: Garrett Burgwardt on June 10, 2011, 10:45:55 PM 6 is just a certain amount of work. Sure you can make blocks be found faster, but it takes less work then. So if you want your TXs to be as secure you'd need to wait the same amount of time.
Title: Re: More blocks per week, less generated per block... Why not? Post by: ByteCoin on June 10, 2011, 11:36:34 PM Shopping could not be completed faster. If blocks were found twice as fast, then it would take 12 blocks for a transaction to confirm, as each block would be worth half as much. I think if you worked the maths through carefully 12 blocks of half the difficulty would actually be somewhat more secure than 6 blocks at the current difficulty.Similarly I think that the current scheme is more secure than 3 blocks at twice the difficulty or one block at six times the difficulty. I think it works a little bit the same way that compound interest using the exponential function is more lucrative than effectively the same rate of simple interest. So 100% simple interest on x after 1 year gives you 2x. 50% interest half-yearly gives 2.25x. 25% quarterly gives 2.44x and the limit is e = 2.7183ish I don't have time to justify this at the moment. Hopefully I will either revisit this topic or someone else will pick up the torch. For the practical purposes above, the difference will be small. ByteCoin Title: Re: More blocks per week, less generated per block... Why not? Post by: grue on June 10, 2011, 11:42:40 PM The main reason why this isn't implemented is because it would be confusing to most people.
Title: Re: More blocks per week, less generated per block... Why not? Post by: gigitrix on June 11, 2011, 01:11:24 AM 10 minutes per block is more than enough time to let absolutely everything propogate through the network. Make blocks smaller in difficulty and miners will get a lot more stale shares, all bitcoin infrastructure will be a lot more dependent on who has the fastest connections etc. It's a fine balance, and I personally don't have a clue if 5 is sufficient, but I know there is a point where this kind of stuff would cause trouble.
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