Quote from: Xenland on April 18, 2013, 08:34:19 AM

That all does sound inline with my knowledge as well but I think the conclusion in the debate as i remember it ended something like "its more profitable to mine the bitcoin blocks than it is to attempt a 51% attack as most retailers, casinos, and other big businesses won't allow you to run off with something until all 6 confirmations are confirmed which would be about the worth if not more than the hiest and if it isn't then that business is just ignorant and stupid for not waiting for all 6+ confirmations.

I think I've read through most of the threads on the subject of reducing the block target time and most of them conclude that zero-confirmation transactions are the preferable way to do most in-person point of sale transactions, and that for most online transactions, waiting 1-6 confirmations is not a hindrance to commerce, as it takes at least one hour to ship a good any way.

What's been neglected is the minority case of online payments where a physical good is not shipped, like online casinos, or depositing bitcoin at an exchange. Any online wallet that accepts bitcoin deposits that can later be withdrawn will need to wait at least one confirmation before crediting the bitcoin to an account or else a double spend attack becomes extremely attractive for attackers and dangerous for the wallet operator.

Faster confirmations (e.g. 1 minute) would mean commerce would be much faster in these use-cases, like allowing deposits at exchanges to be registered in 6 minutes (or if the business wants to especially careful, 10 minutes). This would create a bitcoin economy that reacts more quickly to changes in demand, which I think would help reduce volatility by dampening the magnitude of bubbles, since potential sellers could move their bitcoin to exchanges and sell them more quickly when they see an unsustainable price increase.

Quote from: deepceleron on April 18, 2013, 09:01:14 AM

These statistics are in a network latency-free statistics environment. Multiscale Monte Carlo simulations would need to be performed to find where propagation times on fast-confirmation (or huge block size) networks detectably increase the number of blocks required for the same resistance against blockchain reorganization.

Analysis definitely needs to be done, but I think it should be done in the event that bitcoin changes to a 1 minute block time. The next step I think is to see if there is significant support in the bitcoin community for exploring the option, and if so, creating a bitcoin testnet with 1 minute blocks and see how it behaves.