What if Bitcoin had 1 minute block time and 1 minute difficulty retarget

[FutureSeeker2021]

What if Bitcoin had 1 minute block time and 1 minute difficulty re-target?  Wouldn't we get instant transactions and better network speed?

[1714048514]

1714048514

[TangentC]

What if Bitcoin had 1 minute block time and 1 minute difficulty re-target?  Wouldn't we get instant transactions and better network speed?

Yep , but the Bitcoin developers would never do it.

Funny enough , I believe that Doge is 1 minute block time and 1 minute difficulty re-target.

Bitcoin Devs will claim Bitcoin can't do it , but the irony is Doge has been doing it for years.

Bitcoin Devs goals are to force people to use their offchain solutions, so improving bitcoin onchain performance would hinder their efforts. 

[o_e_l_e_o]

Sure, you can speed up confirmations, but you do so at the cost of decentralization and security.

Decreased block time and/or bigger blocks requires more bandwidth and processing power. You then make it less profitable for smaller miners to continue mining, and centralize the hash rate to larger miners.

You also cause increased forks and stale blocks. With the block time being so short, then the chance of two miners mining a block at the same height increases dramatically, as does the chance of both these chains being extended. You therefore increase the risk of double spends, as well as significantly increase the amount of wasted hashrate in the mining process.

And because of all of that, your security is much worse. 1 new confirmation is nowhere near as secure as 1 old confirmation. Double spends are common. Much of the hashrate is wasted, making 51% attacks by the few remaining large miners much easier.

[tbct_mt2]

If Bitcoin has 1 minute block time, exchanges will require 10 or 30 confirmations to credit your deposit amount to your account. They have to increase number of confirmations.

I don't know OP noticed it yet, with altcoin deposits, exchanges will require more confirmations than Bitcoin deposits. With Bitcoin, they require from 1 to 3 confirmations but for altcoins, the number will be higher considerably. This fact is visible answer.

[TangentC]

If Bitcoin has 1 minute block time, exchanges will require 10 or 30 confirmations to credit your deposit amount to your account. They have to increase number of confirmations.

I don't know OP noticed it yet, with altcoin deposits, exchanges will require more confirmations than Bitcoin deposits. With Bitcoin, they require from 1 to 3 confirmations but for altcoins, the number will be higher considerably. This fact is visible answer.

BTC  recommend 3 confirmations.  up to 30 minutes at a 10 minute blockspeed
LTC   recommend 6 confirmations   up to 15 minutes at a 2½ minute blockspeed
Doge recommend 6 confirmations   up to   6 minutes at a 1 minute blockspeed

Any increase in the above by an exchange is a random increase by an exchange
and unnecessary except as an artificial PR trick on the unknowing.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Any increase in the above by an exchange is a random increase by an exchange
and unnecessary except as an artificial PR trick on the unknowing.

If an exchange is happy to accept fewer confirmations then that's their choice, but they are risking the security of their deposits by doing so.

Take a look at the comparisons here: https://howmanyconfs.com/

For Litecoin to reach the same security as 6 Bitcoin confirmations, it requires ~400 confirmations and ~15 hours.
For Dogecoin, it takes ~600 confirmations and ~10 hours.

[Sithara007]

Satoshi kept the average block interval at around 10 minutes and he may have his reasons to do so. There are altcoins such as Doge, which have a lower block interval. I strongly believe that the relatively large gap between the blocks may be one of the ways to enhance security of the Blockchain. If someone steals a large number of coins from an exchange or any other business, then the victims have enough time to inform everyone, so that the BTC to fiat conversion can be blocked.

[TangentC]

Any increase in the above by an exchange is a random increase by an exchange
and unnecessary except as an artificial PR trick on the unknowing.

If an exchange is happy to accept fewer confirmations then that's their choice, but they are risking the security of their deposits by doing so.

Take a look at the comparisons here: https://howmanyconfs.com/

For Litecoin to reach the same security as 6 Bitcoin confirmations, it requires ~400 confirmations and ~15 hours.
For Dogecoin, it takes ~600 confirmations and ~10 hours.

The site is totally bogus, BTC & LTC/Doge are using different mining algorithms.
Name one person that was doublespent on with LTC  with 6 confirms, their are none.
Like I said random increases are chosen to give bitcoiners a false sense of superiority, key word on false.
https://blog.coinbase.com/announcing-new-confirmation-requirements-4a5504ba8d81
As you can see , they randomly changed confirmations with no real data to back up the changes.
They use to make bitcoin wait 6 confirms and LTC only waited 6 for years.
 
 

[ranochigo]

Decreased block time and/or bigger blocks requires more bandwidth and processing power. You then make it less profitable for smaller miners to continue mining, and centralize the hash rate to larger miners.

Mining is already fairly centralized and smaller miners tend to just use a pool for it. It isn't as feasible to be running your own server at home, hosting it in a data center with greater bandwidth and latency is better. Bandwidth requirement does not increase for the mining farm itself then.

You also cause increased forks and stale blocks. With the block time being so short, then the chance of two miners mining a block at the same height increases dramatically, as does the chance of both these chains being extended. You therefore increase the risk of double spends, as well as significantly increase the amount of wasted hashrate in the mining process.

Given the fact that connections has increased so much and that the bandwidth has improved as well, doesn't the argument weakens? Miners almost always attempts to connect to each other directly to avoid stale blocks. The lesser hops there are, the lesser chance of stale blocks. The situation of having more stales is less prominent than when Bitcoin didn't have these many optimizations.

Probability increases assuming the blocks has to propagate through several hops though, which is how most forks are formed nowadays, with at least one of the pool being less known. But wouldn't it make sense for some compromise as well?

And because of all of that, your security is much worse. 1 new confirmation is nowhere near as secure as 1 old confirmation. Double spends are common. Much of the hashrate is wasted, making 51% attacks by the few remaining large miners much easier.

Depends on the probability of fork occurance. Wouldn't it be more secure primarily because it takes more work to get a confirmation with a 10 minute rather than a 1 minute block interval?

[bitmover]

What if Bitcoin had 1 minute block time and 1 minute difficulty re-target?  Wouldn't we get instant transactions and better network speed?

Your idea probably came from this tweet, right?


Changing parameters like this is not the solution. This is nothing new, and this is not a new technology.  This is  a trade off, as o_e_l_e_o explained.

Scalability should not cost decentralization,  which is the reason for bitcoin to exist.

Although there are other blockchains with short block times, like 30 seconds in ethereum, this is not the solution.

If it were that simple, people would just change that parameter and problems would be solved.

And because of all of that, your security is much worse. 1 new confirmation is nowhere near as secure as 1 old confirmation. Double spends are common. Much of the hashrate is wasted, making 51% attacks by the few remaining large miners much easier.

This is what is most wierd. Elon musk is crying about bitcoin energy consumption ,  but his solution would waste (literally) more energy.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Given the fact that connections has increased so much and that the bandwidth has improved as well, doesn't the argument weakens? Miners almost always attempts to connect to each other directly to avoid stale blocks. The lesser hops there are, the lesser chance of stale blocks. The situation of having more stales is less prominent than when Bitcoin didn't have these many optimizations.

But we still have stale blocks with a frequency of somewhere around 0.1% with a block time of 10 minutes. Decreasing that to 1 minute would increase the number of stale blocks exponentially.

The probability of finding a block in time x is given by the equation 1 - e^(-x/y), where y is the expected block time. If we take x = 10 and y = 600, then the chances of finding a block with 10 seconds currently is around 1.65%. If you drop the block time to a minute and make y = 60, then that chance increases to 15.35%. That's a huge increase in stale blocks and a huge increase in wasted hash power.

This is what is most wierd. Elon musk is crying about bitcoin energy consumption ,  but his solution would waste (literally) more energy.

Elon doesn't actually care about the energy consumption (not that it is a major problem to begin with). It was just an easy target for him to use to manipulate the price. The dude launched a car in to space for crying out loud.

[ranochigo]

But we still have stale blocks with a frequency of somewhere around 0.1% with a block time of 10 minutes. Decreasing that to 1 minute would increase the number of stale blocks exponentially.

The probability of finding a block in time x is given by the equation 1 - e^(-x/y), where y is the expected block time. If we take x = 10 and y = 600, then the chances of finding a block with 10 seconds currently is around 1.65%. If you drop the block time to a minute and make y = 60, then that chance increases to 15.35%. That's a huge increase in stale blocks and a huge increase in wasted hash power.

The fork occurs if two different miners were to broadcast their own blocks and the propagation makes it such that different miners are working on different chain and one of the block gets continued. So assuming that, the time it takes for a block to propagate becomes a factor. If the blocks were to be propagated quicker than X, then the chance of a stale block occurring lowers significantly as well. That is assuming two different miners don't mine the blocks at the same time.

Now, there are implementations such as FIBRE which supposedly reduces latency to the range of milliseconds among miners who runs the node. It is unfortunately deprecated now so I can't find any stats on it. If we were to use it in conjunction with FIBRE, then there shouldn't be a very significant increase in the stale. Of course, there is a limit at which stale blocks becomes far more prominent but I'm sure that 10 minutes at 2MB is still quite conservative given the conditions that we have today.

Besides, it is to the miners interest to attempt to reduce their latency as well. I've not really seen a whole lot of stale blocks involving well known miners so much nowadays. It is almost always between a larger mining pool and some miner that didn't tag their own block. I wouldn't be surprised if the larger miners are far more interconnected than the rest of the network using some form of direct connection.

For the record, I don't think 1 minute block would be well supported and might cut too close to the threshold but I find that we could perhaps explore the possibility of capacity increase in Bitcoin either with larger block sizes or block intervals.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Currently watching. These discussions are probably my favourite ones.

BTC  recommend 3 confirmations.  up to 30 minutes at a 10 minute blockspeed
LTC   recommend 6 confirmations   up to 15 minutes at a 2½ minute blockspeed
Doge recommend 6 confirmations   up to   6 minutes at a 1 minute blockspeed

Did you just make up these?

The incident won't be happening every day. And who told you that 6 confirmations are considered secure for Litecoin? Assuming that 1 Bitcoin confirmation is 4 Litecoin confirmations then it's 6*4 = 24. Dogecoin would be 6*10 = 60, because 1 Bitcoin confirmation is equivalent to 10 Dogecoin confirmations in terms of time.

Name one person that was doublespent on with LTC  with 6 confirms, their are none.

If it ever happens once, it'll be a strong evidence of what is secure and what's not. I consider that response really casual, no offense. I'm personally fine with one confirmation, but if I ever wanted to transact huge amounts, I wouldn't risk it. Recently, the chain was reorganized because two miners mined the same block at the same time. The transactions on the abandoned block are now invalid.

Take a look at the comparisons here: https://howmanyconfs.com/

Something must go wrong. This site calculates the equivalent time of 6 Bitcoin confirmations compared with other cryptocurrencies, based on their offered work. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the offered work refrains from security. Isn't the distribution of the hash rate that matters?

[o_e_l_e_o]

So assuming that, the time it takes for a block to propagate becomes a factor.

What is the average time for any given node to receive a newly mined block, though? If it is around 10 seconds as I used in my example above, then we are still looking at a greater than 9 fold increase in the number of stale blocks by reducing the block time to 1 minute. Sure, if we can speed up propagation through the network then this improves, but it still tends toward centralization because it gives larger miners who will receive blocks first a greater advantage than at present.

I don't think that reducing the block time is the correct approach to scaling anyway. Even if you drop it down to 1 minute, for example, then that is still too long for the "buying coffee" scenario, and thanks to the exponential distribution of blocks you will still see plenty of blocks which take >5 minutes to be found. You would need to wait just as long for the same amount of security as you do on the current chain, if not longer since more hash rate is being wasted mining stale blocks.

Something must go wrong. This site calculates the equivalent time of 6 Bitcoin confirmations compared with other cryptocurrencies, based on their offered work. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the offered work refrains from security. Isn't the distribution of the hash rate that matters?

You can consider it using simple math. Let's say two coins both have 100 hashes per second of mining power. Coin X has a 1 minute block time, while coin Y has a 10 minute block time. After 6 confirmations, coin X will have done 6 minutes of work, which would be 36,000 hashes (on average). After 6 confirmations, coin Y will have done 60 minutes of work, which would be 360,000 hashes (on average). 6 confirmations on both coins are not equivalent in terms of security, even before you consider any differences in hash rate.

[ranochigo]

What is the average time for any given node to receive a newly mined block, though? If it is around 10 seconds as I used in my example above, then we are still looking at a greater than 9 fold increase in the number of stale blocks by reducing the block time to 1 minute. Sure, if we can speed up propagation through the network then this improves, but it still tends toward centralization because it gives larger miners who will receive blocks first a greater advantage than at present.

Back in 2017, the 50th percentile as mentioned by Bitcoinstats.com is ~2s but the 90th percentile will definitely take some time. It is to the best interest of the miners to be included as upper bound of 50th percentile. It is to the best interest of the miners to be as well connected to each other as possible, while centralization concerns are valid, it becomes less if the time it takes to propagate through the network is fairly quick and it isn't illogical to assume every miners will try to get the best possible connection.

Certain miners are more well connected than the rest as of now, either through zombie nodes or a similar implementation to FIBRE.

I don't think that reducing the block time is the correct approach to scaling anyway. Even if you drop it down to 1 minute, for example, then that is still too long for the "buying coffee" scenario, and thanks to the exponential distribution of blocks you will still see plenty of blocks which take >5 minutes to be found. You would need to wait just as long for the same amount of security as you do on the current chain, if not longer since more hash rate is being wasted mining stale blocks.

I don't disagree but that is assuming stales are still occurring on a regular basis. Since 10 minutes essentially represents 10 minute worth of PoW mining and thus a higher cost, doesn't it make sense for merchants to be still allowing 1 confirmations? The need for a 10 minute confirmation as a measure of security can be quite overblown at times; I find it sufficient for half or 10 times less of the current opportunity cost for something that costs $1.

If it ever happens once, it'll be a strong evidence of what is secure and what's not. I consider that response really casual, no offense. I'm personally fine with one confirmation, but if I ever wanted to transact huge amounts, I wouldn't risk it. Recently, the chain was reorganized because two miners mined the same block at the same time. The transactions on the abandoned block are now invalid.

Transactions are not invalid after getting mined in a stale block. In fact, large proportion of the transactions are probably included in both the blocks and thus no matter which fork prevails, your transaction has already been included in the chain. Stale blocks are not a very serious security risk, if the transactions pay enough fees,  then there is a high probability of them being included in both the blocks. It does make it easier for someone to double spend if merchants starting accepting 1-2 confirmations if stale are very prone, which makes it a risk and people can probably exploit it without much effort.

Something must go wrong. This site calculates the equivalent time of 6 Bitcoin confirmations compared with other cryptocurrencies, based on their offered work. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the offered work refrains from security. Isn't the distribution of the hash rate that matters?

No. The cost of re-organizing the blocks is what matters. It doesn't exactly matter if I have 60% of the hashrate, I can easily do a 51% attack but there is no incentives as it is far more expensive than to just mine as an honest entity.

[NotATether]

Changing parameters like this is not the solution. This is nothing new, and this is not a new technology.  This is  a trade off, as o_e_l_e_o explained.

This.

I wish more people understood that you can't just change blockchains by tweaking a bunch of parameters, actual work inside the protocol and consensus must be done to create the specifications which will make your intended effect in the first place.

Because node count will not increase 10X after doing his proposed changes, for example.

But this requires actual programming knowledge and when was the last time you saw an [enterprise, but only because it's a buzzword] blockchain head/visionary/etc who knows C++? And unfortunately, too many people with just theories with no implementation are leading these kinds of projects. Blockchains are sensitive applications where a single code mistake can irrevocably change the protocol. Why do you think we have to add OP_0 at the beginning of multisig scriptSig, or the first block not having any effect on difficulty time, or the average block time being just a little off from 10 minutes because of some precision error? They are all bugs turned unintentional specs.

[BlackHatCoiner]

After 6 confirmations, coin X will have done 6 minutes of work, which would be 600 hashes (on average).

Wouldn't it be total_seconds * hashes_per_sec? In this case, wouldn't it be 360 * 100 = 36,000 hashes ever 6 minutes of work on average?

6 confirmations on both coins are not equivalent in terms of security, even before you consider any differences in hash rate.

Their offered work isn't the same on these confirmations, I get it. But if the hash rate isn't “fairly” distributed then someone could offer more work in a certain time period and hence, more proof.

No. The cost of re-organizing the blocks is what matters. It doesn't exactly matter if I have 60% of the hashrate, I can easily do a 51% attack but there is no incentives as it is far more expensive than to just mine as an honest entity.

Does re-organization differs from replacing previous blocks? If you had 30% of the hash rate, it'd be easier for you to re-organize the blocks in contrast with someone controlling the 10%.

[ranochigo]

Their offered work isn't the same on these confirmations, I get it. But if the hash rate isn't “fairly” distributed then someone could offer more work in a certain time period and hence, more proof.

We're not concerned about the potential of someone executing an attack but rather how much resources is required to attack the chain.

Does re-organization differs from replacing previous blocks? If you had 30% of the hash rate, it'd be easier for you to re-organize the blocks in contrast with someone controlling the 10%.

Reorganizing is equivalent to replacing the blocks. Yes, you will. The distribution of the hashpower isn't the main point here though, distribution of the current hashrate gives you the potential of the majority to execute an attack but it doesn't take into account the cost. Distribution is thus independent of the game theory which is whether they will attack the chain, given the cost and benefit of it as well as the decisions of the other stakeholders.

[o_e_l_e_o]

The need for a 10 minute confirmation as a measure of security can be quite overblown at times; I find it sufficient for half or 10 times less of the current opportunity cost for something that costs $1.

Sure, but even with a 1 minute block time you can't reliably achieve this. Waiting 1 minute for 1 confirmation is still too long for Starbucks or McDonald's, especially when that 1 minute could easily turn in to 5 minutes or more.

Wouldn't it be total_seconds * hashes_per_sec? In this case, wouldn't it be 360 * 100 = 36,000 hashes ever 6 minutes of work on average?

Yeah thanks. I used minutes instead of seconds, but the principle still stands. It doesn't really matter how fast or slow your confirmations are; what matters is how much work an attacker would have to do to reverse your transaction. If you have 6 confirmations in an hour or 60 in an hour, they still need to do an hour's worth of hashrate to reverse a transaction.

[BlackHatCoiner]

It doesn't really matter how fast or slow your confirmations are; what matters is how much work an attacker would have to do to reverse your transaction.

Yes, but in howmanyconfs.com it says that the equivalent time of 6 Bitcoin confirmation blocks would be 375 Litecoin ones, while it should say 24. (1 BTC block = 4 LTC blocks)