"Number of Confirmations". One reason why ALL alts are a fail!

[lophie]

This is a quick thread and a quick read. It is basically because I am snapping right now at this "Better and faster confirmations" lie/s. Starting Litecoin and going to infinite amount of alt coins.

In order to make the confirmations faster or better, dear alt coin designer/scammer. Please try to make something that fixes why 6 confirmations going in 60 minutes are chosen to begin with.

The number of confirmations and time per confirmation are suggestions by Satoshi with the rationale that "one hour after the first inclusion in a block is probably a good time to assume that the block has propagated through out the whole network."

If the internet we live in is fundamentally different than the times of Satoshi and a choice of different estimation block generation and propagation time is justified then hurray you just discovered the successor of Bitcoin. Other wise we are just wasting effort in a pyramid scams here and there.

Nothing against the gains I made alot of money from alts but come on someone please form the love of god focus your effort to patch up Bitcoin instead of doing a cheap shot toward making some money! I promise you even now Bitcoin is so young you will get to be a millionaire in your life time. Now do something to benefit humanity instead. God!

>Calmed down a bit -_-! still think this must be posted, thank you for reading. Please criticize constructively <

[1715000014]

1715000014

[BitcoinEXpress]

I don't know about you, but I've had a blast playing games with alts that have fast confirms 


~BCX~

[DigitalGoldCoin]

How does a faster confirmation make a coin a 'failure'?

Seriously, I am just asking a question.

[DeathAndTaxes]

That was not the reason the block frequency was chosen.  If you start from a flawed premise you end with a flawed conclusion.  Satoshi wrote a nice paper it would be good if people actually read it.

[Nolo]

I started to reply with what I feel is a legitimate explanation to your theory, but then I saw your avatar.  I don't waste my time discussing things with such people. 

inb4: "But it was the Buddhist symbol for eternity!" or whatever other immature bullshit that he tries to spew. 

[Hazard]

That's not a swastika.

OP is only half correct in his statements... It allows a certain type of attack to be staged faster, but does not necessarily make that attack easier.

[A L I E N]

Nothing new brought up here, move along...

[lophie]

Ok. Let me give an example to show my point. Failcoin is an SHA2656 based cryptocurrency which is designed to have a block generated every 3 minutes. Failcoin advertise faster confirmations of 4 confirmations.

Again in Bitcoin 6 confirmations are chosen as an approximation of the passage of an hour of time which is assumed (not just a guess. Satoshi doesn’t just guess). Judging by the fact that Both Bitcoin and Failcoin use the same networking infrastructure (internet). We can calculate that 20 confirmations would be a good number to assume a safe irreversible transaction in Failcoin. But failcoin advertise the magical number of 4 confirmations to be enough.

Now lets tackle the block generation time. In Bitcoin the rate of generation was chosen with forks and orphans in mind and 10 minutes were chosen as the sweet spot to prevent the excessive interruptive occurrence of such events. Failcoin advertises 3 minutes generation time per block. If not backed and justified by an analysis of the ration between Bitcoin forks/orphan events occurrence against the ones happening in Failcoin. The generation rate would just make the network of Failcoin inefficient and prone to attacks and double spends.

I hope this make what I am trying to explain clearer. If someone is reading this and have more to add to support or go against it. Please go ahead. thank you.

Lophie

[lophie]

That was not the reason the block frequency was chosen.  If you start from a flawed premise you end with a flawed conclusion.  Satoshi wrote a nice paper it would be good if people actually read it.

I am sorry if the language I used made a confusion block generation frequency is a different issue that I wrote about in the above added comment and it was not the  premise I started with. The premise is the time to wait for the assumption of a save irreversible transaction to be one hour.

[lophie]

Nothing new brought up here, move along...

Yet this post exists so as many many alts that spawn everyday without an original difference from Bitcoin (I am eneralising but I know some are awesome. PoS vs PoW, SHA256 vs Scrypt and more).

[lophie]

That's not a swastika.

OP is only half correct in his statements... It allows a certain type of attack to be staged faster, but does not necessarily make that attack easier.

Indeed your addition is very correct. 

[DeathAndTaxes]

That was not the reason the block frequency was chosen.  If you start from a flawed premise you end with a flawed conclusion.  Satoshi wrote a nice paper it would be good if people actually read it.

I am sorry if the language I used made a confusion block generation frequency is a different issue that I wrote about in the above added comment and it was not the  premise I started with. The premise is the time to wait for the assumption of a save irreversible transaction to be one hour.

That is still incorrect.  Once again Satoshi wrote a paper and the cool thing is there is no cost to read it.

[lophie]

That was not the reason the block frequency was chosen.  If you start from a flawed premise you end with a flawed conclusion.  Satoshi wrote a nice paper it would be good if people actually read it.

I am sorry if the language I used made a confusion block generation frequency is a different issue that I wrote about in the above added comment and it was not the  premise I started with. The premise is the time to wait for the assumption of a save irreversible transaction to be one hour.

That is still incorrect.  Once again Satoshi wrote a paper and the cool thing is there is no cost to read it.

The selection of one hour time frame was not mentioned in the paper but was in one of his responses in the mailing list. Know your facts.

[DigitalGoldCoin]

ok, so you think that faster confirmations means that a coin will fail?

[lophie]

DeathAndTaxes. Thank you for the advice. So I went back and read the paper once more quickly. I was not mistaken regarding the 6 confirmations mark it was never mentioned in the paper. Also the consequences of a generation time of ten minutes were not discussed in the paper as well. All those were in the mailing list.

Generation time was just used as an example (Turned out to be one hell of an example that worked like a charm! Maybe an educated guess from Satoshi or analysis done privately).

6 confirmation was never chosen in the paper and what was discussed is the probability of the success of a double spend getting smaller and smaller with every confirmation.

I am sorry if I still don't see where I was mistaken please point me to it. I am trying to learn as well as inform in the same time. Thank you.

[aa]

In 15 minutes I can get 6 confirms with Litecoin. I'll get 1 with Bitcoin. Do you understand how this works? We aren't back in 2008 where most of North America was still on 100KB/s connections. The data does not take that long to sync across the network. The hash rate is high enough and spread equally in Litecoin.

Do I care about the shitcoins like FTC that get 51% attacked every week? No. They can deal with their shitty developers and diseased community on their own, it doesn't affect Litecoin in any way.

[digitalindustry]

Id be interested to get feedback on the community feeling regarding lower frequency time , so BTC chose 10 minutes and 6 confirms , LTC chose something less than that .

But there are other vectors to this argument of course , of security that is , LTC has a few different fundamentals .

When one looks at say DGC it has a 60 second frequency yes ?  I didnt really take notice before , but what could be the effects either way of such a fast frequency ?  

Edit 20 seconds for DGC - which is interesting , i expect this is why they introduced checkpoint measures.

[r3wt]

lophie, one can argue that transactions have enough time to propagate around to enough nodes in about 3 minutes. hell, even on small time coins, like my recent OSC, a transaction is broadcast through 19 nodes or more on average, within about 20 seconds. its safe to say that satoshi was being overly cautious i think. in 2009, i had a 300 kb/ps internet connection for about 60 bucks a month. in 2013, i have a 20 mb/ps connection at 45/month. alot has changed my friend. i did a test yesterday in routing transactions through proxies on osc and back to a computer in my subnet not on the proxy. it took about 37 m/s longer for a transaction going through the proxy server in the netherlands. versus the instantaneous transaction on my subnet. just food for thought, and you know i have respect for your opinions. if 3 minutes ever becomes a problem for OSC i will increase it to 6 confirms/1 minute instead of 3 confirms/1minute.

[Keldel]

Thanks OP! You are correct.

10 minutes is a time carefully chosen as a balance between usability and security.

6 confirmations (6*10 minutes) is a number carefully chosen as a balance between usability and security. 6 confirmations are just a recommendation though, you can choose higher or lower security depending on your needs.

[r3wt]

Thanks OP! You are correct.

10 minutes is a time carefully chosen as a balance between usability and security.

6 confirmations (6*10 minutes) is a number carefully chosen as a balance between usability and security. 6 confirmations are just a recommendation though, you can choose higher or lower security depending on your needs.

eh you're probably right and us with fast confirm coins are all in denial >.<