On reddit, Gavin has responded favorably to cryptodude1's proposal that Bitcoin's 10 minute block interval be reduced to 1 minute.
If it is done at the next block reward halving (about July 2016) the block reward would drop from 25 BTC to 1.25 BTC in order to maintain the 21 million BTC limit. Difficulty would be
reduced by 10x.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/35hpkt/please_remind_me_once_again_why_we_cant_decrease/cr4wk0gI think 1-minute blocks is a good idea. The best time to roll that out would be the next subsidy halving (makes the code much simpler).
We still need a bigger max block size, though.
...
My mind has been blown.
I still consider myself a major noob in relation to all the working of the bitcoin protocol and etc,
but every other day, someone is stating that the 10 minute block time is also an important security feature.
In the event of a roll back (bitcoin bug) and we were using a 1 minute block time,
we could have a chain of hundreds or even a thousand blocks reversed.
What would we then need to tell average users and merchants then? What about future users or merchants?
Instead of the 6 blocks deep being consider secure, we are gonna say 60 blocks deep is now the safest?
But I dont know really. As i said I'm a noob.
I'm going to guess that Gavin was joking. But if he wasn't then I'm really lost.
It's not a joke idea. A block 6 hours old with 1 minute intervals would be slightly more secure than with 10 minute intervals, and David Hudson points out that people thinking of security in terms of confirmations would do better to think of security in terms of time.
Sergio Lerner analyzes this proposal...
It is not however, a simple issue, as many of the replies indicate.