A recent paper proposes a slightly larger header in order to create a tighter distribution on the mining times for adding blocks. They suggest that current PoW for bitcoin has heavy tails, such that 5% of the blocks added will have an inter-block interval of at least 40-minutes.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1709.08750.pdfThis seems very reasonable to me, though I realize that the politics of change make it unlikely to be adopted. But, I'd be curious what the Bitcoin Forum members think about the idea. Would it make sense to try and create a more uniform distribution (i.e. narrower variance) for the blockchain additions? What are the barriers to the adoption of this type of idea? Would it make sense to look for an average number that is smaller than ten minutes (and if so, what number would be ideal)?
