Quote from: centenary on May 21, 2013, 02:22:11 AM

Quote from: Tobius on May 21, 2013, 02:15:24 AM

Quote from: centenary on May 21, 2013, 01:47:05 AM

For all cryptocurrencies based off the Bitcoin protocol, the block time needs to be chosen carefully in order to guarantee that nearly every node in the distributed network maintains the same view of the blockchain. The block time needs to be, at the very least, several times larger than the maximum end-to-end propagation delay across the distributed network.

Choosing a very short block time demonstrates a lack of understanding of this requirement. If you make block times very short, then nodes will generate blocks faster than it would take for notifications to reach nodes on the opposite end of the distributed network. This will cause nodes within the distributed network to have inconsistent views of the blockchain.

What does this mean? 1) Lots of orphans. 2) Very long orphan blockchains. 3) Significantly reduced security for the network.

Earlier today, one of the WorldCoin mining pools (http://wdc.dontmine.me) was on an orphan blockchain for more than 300 blocks. That would never happen for any competently designed coin.

Altcoins with very short block times have no real future. Once they reach a certain critical mass, they will inherently self-destruct due to the large percentage of inconsistency within the distributed network. Imagine the blockchain accidentally forking into two separate blockchains. With very short block times, that's a real possibility. Or imagine having a transaction confirmed, only to realize hours later that the transaction was confirmed in an orphan blockchain and needs to be rolled back and reconfirmed. No one would realistically support such an altcoin.

If you're going to release an altcoin, do the community a favor and at least release something that appears competently designed.

One small issue, BTC/LTC are too slow. As long as that remains a reality, we're going to have to at least experiment with lower block times :\

The only way to realistically lower the block times is to restructure the blockchain and the protocol for the distributed network. You can't simply copy the Bitcoin protocol and paste in arbitrarily small block times, the Bitcoin protocol wasn't designed for that.

That I am aware of, but hey, all of these coins are technically "experiments", so there's always time and room to do just that. Gotta start somewhere