Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Would faster block creation give lower security?
by
amincd
on 18/04/2013, 07:05:53 UTC
This is not true. While some security is established by the amount of time required to get a confirmation, an attacker with a given hashrate will have a much higher probability of double spending a 1-confirmation transaction in a 10 minute block-time chain than a 10-confirmation transaction in a 1 minute block-time chain. Meni Rosenfeld showed this mathematically: https://bitcoil.co.il/Doublespend.pdf

The trade-off as far as I can see is that with a higher rate of block generation, latency wastes more work, leading to lower difficulty for a >50% attack. For a POW network with a 62.94 TH/s hashrate like bitcoin, a 10% decline in the difficulty of pulling off a >50% attack is probably tolerable, and worth the gain in more quickly secured transactions.