Post
Topic
Board Beginners & Help
Re: Why is the block time 10 minutes?
by
Point at Infinity
on 14/04/2013, 18:47:05 UTC
So, as I said before, it's completely arbitrary?

Not completely. The time has to be long enough for every node to verify the block. 10 minutes was chosen by Satoshi as a compromise between network security and confirmation times. In hindsight a smaller value might have been better, but not much smaller. With older versions of Bitcoin it sometimes took over a minute before every node received the block, and there needs to be a wide margin for safety.