Coins with very short block times demonstrate incompetence

[fenican]

10,212 world internet latency traces were under 300 ms, considered "Nominal".  Only one is presently 300 ms or over

http://www.internetweathermap.com/map

[DeadEyeCool]

Well, for what its worth, I was still able to solo mine 544 coins at launch with a measly 1.2 mash. Yes there were a lot of orphans, but things seemed to work themselves out.

I honestly don't think the orphan rate is that critical of a flaw when you gain INSTANT TRANSACTIONS.

Let's join the 21st century people, everyone expects payment to be instantaneous in this day and age.

If you want instant, then decentralized is not the solution.

Negative. We can have our cake and eat it too. Worldcoin has proven this.

If the network stays healthy, we are good to go. It hasn't even been a week since launch!

[clint25n]

There hasn't been any report of anyone 'losing coins' this way, except for mining orphans, which is to expected of any crypto. Even bitcoin has orphans.

+1

Thousands of transfers so far, no report of lost coins during transactions.. only miner issues. And network was near 1/4 of LTC rate.
But I understand the op's concern now powpow, thx.

[jj9guy]

Internet latency is much lower than when Bitcoin was first released (2009).  Should not be an issue on modern networks most nodes can ping each other within 250 ms

That's a laughable statement.

http://i.stack.imgur.com/0pP3S.png

Glad to see major metro areas in the US is consider the WORLD.

You know like the world series 

[jj9guy]

Someone should just make replace the block time to nanoseconds in the bitcoin source and wham bam instant transactions. I wonder why the bitcoin developers didnt figure that one out. What a bunch of noobs.

[ecliptic]

Someone should just make replace the block time to nanoseconds in the bitcoin source and wham bam instant transactions. I wonder why the bitcoin developers didnt figure that one out. What a bunch of noobs.

Try block time of one plank time

[centenary]

The network is connected enough so that there is multiple ways to route messages between each pair of nodes.  If a node dies on a route between two nodes, messages are redirected across other routes that don't involve the dead node.

Very good, and the same applies to nodes that can't get an update within 15sec.

That really isn't good enough.

As I said, the block time needs to be more than several times the maximum end-to-end propagation delay.  This is needed to prevent competing nodes from generating blocks at the same time and convincing large parts of the network that their respective block is the winning block.  If competing nodes can convince large parts of the network that their respective block is the winning block, you risk fragmentation of the blockchain.  Having the block time be at least several times the maximum end-to-end propagation delays helps prevent competing nodes from convincing large parts of the network that their respective block is the winning block.

So what is the maximum end-to-end propagation delay?  Bitcoin networks are constructed by randomly connecting to IP addresses.  This means that Bitcoin networks ignore geographic locations, so end-to-end communication can cross the globe multiple times.  The network construction also does not limit the width of the network, so end-to-end communication can require numerous hops.  Add processing delays on each node and you can easily get a maximum end-to-end propagation time that is tens of seconds.

[centenary]

Well, for what its worth, I was still able to solo mine 544 coins at launch with a measly 1.2 mash. Yes there were a lot of orphans, but things seemed to work themselves out.

I honestly don't think the orphan rate is that critical of a flaw when you gain INSTANT TRANSACTIONS.

Let's join the 21st century people, everyone expects payment to be instantaneous in this day and age.

If you want instant, then decentralized is not the solution.

Negative. We can have our cake and eat it too. Worldcoin has proven this.

If the network stays healthy, we are good to go. It hasn't even been a week since launch!

Really?  WorldCoin has proven this?  Which other coin has had an entire mining pool mining on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 consecutive blocks?

If vendors accept a coin with a short block time(like Worldcoin), it wouldn't matter how frustrated the miners got for overwhelming the network with a huge hash rate.
Traders would still trade, holders would still spend and vendors would still convert; regardless of the miners.
The death of a coin is going to depend on the adoption and infrastructure.

One can always see this as a way to discourage too many miners from throwing hashes at the network, and if there is a major acceptance of such a coin due to marketing, promotion, new software and speed.. then it will gain value and the miners will be the only ones with a problem, that is, only if they overwhelm the network.

The problem is when the orphan chain ends up being the main chain.  Now, you have real transactions taking place on the orphan chain -- someone is going to lose their coins.

There hasn't been any report of anyone 'losing coins' this way, except for mining orphans, which is to expected of any crypto. Even bitcoin has orphans.

With Bitcoins you will encounter an occasional orphan, not 300 orphans consecutively.

[DeadEyeCool]

Well, for what its worth, I was still able to solo mine 544 coins at launch with a measly 1.2 mash. Yes there were a lot of orphans, but things seemed to work themselves out.

I honestly don't think the orphan rate is that critical of a flaw when you gain INSTANT TRANSACTIONS.

Let's join the 21st century people, everyone expects payment to be instantaneous in this day and age.

If you want instant, then decentralized is not the solution.

Negative. We can have our cake and eat it too. Worldcoin has proven this.

If the network stays healthy, we are good to go. It hasn't even been a week since launch!

Really?  WorldCoin has proven this?  Which other coin has had an entire mining pool mining on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 consecutive blocks?

If vendors accept a coin with a short block time(like Worldcoin), it wouldn't matter how frustrated the miners got for overwhelming the network with a huge hash rate.
Traders would still trade, holders would still spend and vendors would still convert; regardless of the miners.
The death of a coin is going to depend on the adoption and infrastructure.

One can always see this as a way to discourage too many miners from throwing hashes at the network, and if there is a major acceptance of such a coin due to marketing, promotion, new software and speed.. then it will gain value and the miners will be the only ones with a problem, that is, only if they overwhelm the network.

The problem is when the orphan chain ends up being the main chain.  Now, you have real transactions taking place on the orphan chain -- someone is going to lose their coins.

There hasn't been any report of anyone 'losing coins' this way, except for mining orphans, which is to expected of any crypto. Even bitcoin has orphans.

With Bitcoins you will encounter an occasional orphan, not 300 orphans consecutively.

Prove it. And what was the current difficulty?

[jj9guy]

This is an example of why democracy doesnt work for everything. You might sit down and carefully choose the parameters for your program like the bitcoin developers did only for people to come use your source and max everything out like if designing a coin was the equivalent of using gameshark to get infinite gil.

[clint25n]

Really?  WorldCoin has proven this?  Which other coin has had an entire mining pool mining on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 consecutive blocks?

The problems were reported by miners; no one lost coins in transactions, at least none were reported.
Also, the pool that took over the blockchain (erundook's) was at about 90% of the hash power since pools just started popping up and his was the most popular at the moment. Ask him.

Fortunately, we are down to only one issue which the OP didn't bring up (powpow did) and that is, will traders lose coins. I'd say 300 blocks was a good test for that.

[centenary]

Well, for what its worth, I was still able to solo mine 544 coins at launch with a measly 1.2 mash. Yes there were a lot of orphans, but things seemed to work themselves out.

I honestly don't think the orphan rate is that critical of a flaw when you gain INSTANT TRANSACTIONS.

Let's join the 21st century people, everyone expects payment to be instantaneous in this day and age.

If you want instant, then decentralized is not the solution.

Negative. We can have our cake and eat it too. Worldcoin has proven this.

If the network stays healthy, we are good to go. It hasn't even been a week since launch!

Really?  WorldCoin has proven this?  Which other coin has had an entire mining pool mining on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 consecutive blocks?

If vendors accept a coin with a short block time(like Worldcoin), it wouldn't matter how frustrated the miners got for overwhelming the network with a huge hash rate.
Traders would still trade, holders would still spend and vendors would still convert; regardless of the miners.
The death of a coin is going to depend on the adoption and infrastructure.

One can always see this as a way to discourage too many miners from throwing hashes at the network, and if there is a major acceptance of such a coin due to marketing, promotion, new software and speed.. then it will gain value and the miners will be the only ones with a problem, that is, only if they overwhelm the network.

The problem is when the orphan chain ends up being the main chain.  Now, you have real transactions taking place on the orphan chain -- someone is going to lose their coins.

There hasn't been any report of anyone 'losing coins' this way, except for mining orphans, which is to expected of any crypto. Even bitcoin has orphans.

With Bitcoins you will encounter an occasional orphan, not 300 orphans consecutively.

Prove it. And what was the current difficulty?

Prove what exactly, that the mining pool was on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 blocks?  Go read the mining pool's news for yourself: http://wdc.dontmine.me/news

This happened today, so the difficulty was either 5-ish or 8-ish.  It doesn't really matter what the difficulty was though, the pool had a quarter of the net hash rate the entire day

[erk]

As I said, the block time needs to be more than several times the maximum end-to-end propagation delay.  This is needed to prevent competing nodes from generating blocks at the same time and convincing large parts of the network that their respective block is the winning block.  If competing nodes can convince large parts of the network that their respective block is the winning block, you risk fragmentation of the blockchain.  Having the block time be at least several times the maximum end-to-end propagation delays helps prevent competing nodes from convincing large parts of the network that their respective block is the winning block.

Block chain fragmentation is not the issue, an overhead for sure, but it's the "double spend attack" from competing chains that we are worried about, which BTW doesn't means "51% attack". You can try to double spend with less but you may not be successful. The more blocks generated, the smaller your chance.  The probability of success with a <50% attack depends on the number of blocks and not the amount of time. This is an advantage of shorter block times.

[DeadEyeCool]

This is an example of why democracy doesnt work for everything. You might sit down and carefully choose the parameters for your program like the bitcoin developers did only for people to come use your source and max everything out like if designing a coin was the equivalent of using gameshark to get infinite gil.

It was made open source for the very reason that it could be improved upon, in the future, when networks and computers became better.

That, and it would be harder to shut down multiple coins.

[centenary]

Really?  WorldCoin has proven this?  Which other coin has had an entire mining pool mining on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 consecutive blocks?

The problems were reported by miners; no one lost coins in transactions, at least none were reported.
Also, the pool that took over the blockchain (erundook's) was at about 90% of the hash power since pools just started popping up and his was the most popular. Ask him.

Okay, sure, you can't lose coins that weren't given to you in the first place.  The point is that the network can't stay self-consistent with the given block time parameter.

[jj9guy]

This is an example of why democracy doesnt work for everything. You might sit down and carefully choose the parameters for your program like the bitcoin developers did only for people to come use your source and max everything out like if designing a coin was the equivalent of using gameshark to get infinite gil.

It was made open source for the very reason that it could be improved upon, in the future, when networks and computers became better.

That, and it would be harder to shut down multiple coins.

Yeah like Firefox is open source so people could change the icon image and about:config for backspace and call it "Flamefox: the ultimate opensource browser. Way better than Firefox"

[mr_random]

Really?  WorldCoin has proven this?  Which other coin has had an entire mining pool mining on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 consecutive blocks?

The problems were reported by miners; no one lost coins in transactions, at least none were reported.
Also, the pool that took over the blockchain (erundook's) was at about 90% of the hash power since pools just started popping up and his was the most popular at the moment. Ask him.

Fortunately, we are down to only one issue which the OP didn't bring up (powpow did) and that is, will traders lose coins. I'd say 300 blocks was a good test for that.

Good post.

[DeadEyeCool]

Well, for what its worth, I was still able to solo mine 544 coins at launch with a measly 1.2 mash. Yes there were a lot of orphans, but things seemed to work themselves out.

I honestly don't think the orphan rate is that critical of a flaw when you gain INSTANT TRANSACTIONS.

Let's join the 21st century people, everyone expects payment to be instantaneous in this day and age.

If you want instant, then decentralized is not the solution.

Negative. We can have our cake and eat it too. Worldcoin has proven this.

If the network stays healthy, we are good to go. It hasn't even been a week since launch!

Really?  WorldCoin has proven this?  Which other coin has had an entire mining pool mining on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 consecutive blocks?

If vendors accept a coin with a short block time(like Worldcoin), it wouldn't matter how frustrated the miners got for overwhelming the network with a huge hash rate.
Traders would still trade, holders would still spend and vendors would still convert; regardless of the miners.
The death of a coin is going to depend on the adoption and infrastructure.

One can always see this as a way to discourage too many miners from throwing hashes at the network, and if there is a major acceptance of such a coin due to marketing, promotion, new software and speed.. then it will gain value and the miners will be the only ones with a problem, that is, only if they overwhelm the network.

The problem is when the orphan chain ends up being the main chain.  Now, you have real transactions taking place on the orphan chain -- someone is going to lose their coins.

There hasn't been any report of anyone 'losing coins' this way, except for mining orphans, which is to expected of any crypto. Even bitcoin has orphans.

With Bitcoins you will encounter an occasional orphan, not 300 orphans consecutively.

Prove it. And what was the current difficulty?

Prove what exactly, that the mining pool was on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 blocks?  Go read the mining pool's news for yourself: http://wdc.dontmine.me/news

This happened today, so the difficulty was either 5-ish or 8-ish.  It doesn't really matter what the difficulty was though, the pool had a quarter of the net hash rate the entire day

That pool is really not that good. I was mining it for a while after launch, and I had constant disconnects. I wouldn't doubt the pool operator was doing something wrong.

I've been on Big Verns pool since then, and never had a problem.

Talk to me when this has happened on multiple, more reputable pools.

[DeadEyeCool]

This is an example of why democracy doesnt work for everything. You might sit down and carefully choose the parameters for your program like the bitcoin developers did only for people to come use your source and max everything out like if designing a coin was the equivalent of using gameshark to get infinite gil.

It was made open source for the very reason that it could be improved upon, in the future, when networks and computers became better.

That, and it would be harder to shut down multiple coins.

Yeah like Firefox is open source so people could change the icon image and about:config for backspace and call it "Flamefox: the ultimate opensource browser. Way better than Firefox"

Cool story bro

[centenary]

As I said, the block time needs to be more than several times the maximum end-to-end propagation delay.  This is needed to prevent competing nodes from generating blocks at the same time and convincing large parts of the network that their respective block is the winning block.  If competing nodes can convince large parts of the network that their respective block is the winning block, you risk fragmentation of the blockchain.  Having the block time be at least several times the maximum end-to-end propagation delays helps prevent competing nodes from convincing large parts of the network that their respective block is the winning block.

Block chain fragmentation is not the issue, an overhead for sure, but it's the "double spend attack" from competing chains that we are worried about, which BTW doesn't means "51% attack". You can try to double spend with less but you may not be successful. The more blocks generated, the smaller your chance.  The probability of success with a <50% attack depends on the number of blocks and not the amount of time. This is an advantage of shorter block times.

So what you're saying is, fragmentation is not an issue, except that it allows for double spend attacks.  Sounds like that means fragmentation is in fact an issue.

The probability of success with a <50% attack depends on you generating significantly more blocks than everyone else.  The global block time neither helps nor impedes your ability to do so.