Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: 90 minutes for 1 block...
by
gmaxwell
on 17/10/2012, 14:49:08 UTC
Yeah, like once every 4 years...   But anyway a faster coin will come around soon enough...
Not one based on the bitcoin algorithm.  Litecoin is already too fast most likely.

The Bitcoin algorithm is not convergent when the highest latency (including all block validation time) bisection of the hash rate becomes higher than the mean time between blocks. E.g. if a chain has a 3 minute average block time an it takes 3 minutes for some half of the miners to hear from and validate another half, then most of the time a new block will be found in each half before it's heard about the other half's blocks and the two will form longer and longer forks, which take longer and longer to reorg between. The result is a partition with the halves not able to agree on the history of transactions.

At current transactions levels (which are only a portion of the maximum allowed) Bitcoin is already seeing multi-minute propagation in some cases.

Litecoin's blocks could well be far enough apart to escape being doomed from this— escaping with just needing to wait for some more confirmations to cope with larger reorgs due to slower convergence (as the number of confirms you must wait for a given confidence goes up as you approach the latency bound); but it seems unlikely that the bitcoin algorithm could go much faster successfully.

It's a shame people don't even bother to learn from all the failed altcoins who have twiddled Bitcoin's parameters without understanding them or their reason for existence. They weren't set the way they were just to piss you off. Tongue