I have two basic ideas for fixing the bottleneck civil war being fought at Bitcoin over speeding up the # of blocks created per day and creating a new altcoin. Any of these would work:
- Simply modify the code to lower the difficulty so that a block is created on the average of 2.5 minutes. If we kept the blocksize the same, then we would increase throughput by four fold. The one disadvantage would be that coin generation would speed up and the halving rate would be every year. We could decrease the number of coins generated to a quarter of current rate, so that the same number of coins would be generated over the same amount of time. The other big advantage is that this would be very easy code changes to make. I would alter version 0x20000000 for this.
- Increase mining options like Myriadcoin does. If we had five different mining options, we could keep HSH256 difficulty the same while setting the other mining variations to a difficulty based on a ten minute average time. This would increase tx speed by five fold while also increasing decentralization. The disadvantage of this idea is that it would require more code changes (beyond my ability to do safely).
This would need a very small change in code. Just a change in the difficulty formula. If we kept the number of coins generated the same, it would greatly speed up the mining rate, but it would actually be a soft fork, since it would be compatible with previous versions of Bitcoin.
We could decrease the number of coins generated. For instance, if we produced blocks four times as fast, we should decrease the mining reward by a factor of four.
Creating an altcoin that is a fork of Bitcoin would prevent the premine/instamine/secretmine that seems to be the bane of many altcoins.
Would any of you support any of these two ideas? If so, which one would you prefer? If we went with the first idea, can you think of any problems with altering version 0x20000000.
