Quote from: earonesty on November 26, 2013, 09:38:58 PM

Quote from: Kluge on April 08, 2013, 09:13:49 AM

Quote from: josvazg on April 08, 2013, 09:08:55 AM

Otherwise another currency that can do what BTC can and ALSO supports transacting in half a minute will replace bitcoin in many uses and will devaluate your BTCs.

Like Litecoin? It was released well over a year ago, I think.

Litecoin is 15 mins. Bitcoin is an hour. We need something even lighter... a cryptocurrency with migh lighter-weight block targets in seconds. I'm not certain chain length is the right way to gain consensus either. The algorith ceph uses for consensus could probably e modified. I think it's possible to get much more rapid peer confirmation, and I agree.... the first cryptocurrency that boasts rapid confirm times will be the one to win.

What's done is done and you've already revived the thread. New users are reminded to please check the timestamp of the post they are replying to, to avoid necro'ing old topics. Nevertheless, welcome.

This is a topic that has been discussed endlessly, and will continue to be. Things to remember:

(1) With pure proof-of-work based systems like Bitcoin and Litecoin, it is confirmation TIME that ensures security, not the confirmations themselves. The 2.5 minute-average blocks of Litecoin are nice for providing network granularity, getting us to the initial confirmation faster, and for providing a higher capacity for transactions in the blockchain per unit time, but they come at a downside of increased odds of other things like orphaned blocks and other overhead. Decreasing the block interval further is not a good idea with a pure proof-of-work system.

(2) The thing people struggle with, presumably because it is math, is that, for a given network hashing power, 1 Bitcoin confirmation has the same security as 4 Litecoin confirmations. This can be calculated in the same way that Satoshi discusses it in his Security section (section 11) in the whitepaper. The only difference is the granularity, and increased overhead.

tl;dr - Faster block intervals is not the answer or we would have done it already. It just doesn't work that way with proof-of-work systems. I realize you technically are proposing someone create a faster one, not modify or fork an existing crypto, but I just want to emphasize the level of difficulty and where it exists, which is not in the domain of simply making a clone or a POW system with arbitrarily faster block intervals.