Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: Coins with very short block times demonstrate incompetence
by
erk
on 21/05/2013, 05:45:11 UTC

Yes, but like most things in life, an important balance between too much and too little exists. Shorter block times make it harder for <50% attacks to succeed, true, but by increasing the number of orphans, it decreases the effective hash rate of the network, making a >50% attack potentially much easier. Bitcoin considers the potential risks of a successful >50% attack to be very high, so Satoshi chose a long block time.
This seems like mathematical nonsense, please prove to me that  for example if there are 4 times more chain splits with 1/4 the block time, that there are less iterations to arrive at consensus within the same duration. I bet you can't, because the increase in chain splits is trivial compared to the increase in blocks.

LTC has certainly proven for a long time that a shorter than 10min block target is perfectly viable.