I apologize if I ask the following obvious questions and perhaps risk wasting everyone's time. But, I have these nagging questions for a while now:
1). As I understand it, the 10 minutes delay is to create a new block that there's enough/ sufficient time to fill and confirm the transactions (globally). But isn't it quite wasteful to keep adjusting the difficulty level to maintain the 10 minutes delay ? What is so special about the 10 minutes delay? Has there been any study to quantify more accurately the amount of time to reach the nodes globally ?
See to maintain an equilibrium between the swiftness of transactions and limited supply of bitcoin this delay of 10 minutes was set. If there would have been no delay time miners could have even found hundreds of blocks within seconds using the current amount of technology. Moreover the problem of blocks with quite less or even zero number of transactions would also increase. Such blocks would just add some wasteful load over the network.
2). Let say if we don't have to worry about the trust issue, in theory we only need one, or perhaps two confirmations right ? So for the remaining 51% confirmations is essentially to ensure that there's no cheating could happen. I got that so far...
Ofcourse its possible but have you ever heard about reversal of transactions? Any bitcoin transaction processed can be manipulated and reversed by someone with good amount of computing power and knowledge. More amount of confirmations make sure that the block becomes almost immovable thus no way to reverse the transactions. Generally 6 confirmations are considered quite good.
3). But what if we could accomplish item#1 and #2 in 5 minutes, 3 minutes or even 30 seconds - shouldn't that be a good thing ? Why make it more difficult, delay until 10 minutes and empowering expensive equipment ? That seems to feed into the endless cycles of who's got bigger and faster mining capability? Understand that it seems to justify the rise in bitcoin price...
Yes, we could but the problem would be the same you will see more amount of blocks with lesser transactions getting confirmed things are not going to change because ultimately one block would contain lesser number of transactions which need to be in same number of blocks to get all confirmations.
4). What about making the 51st % node (with the longest chain) to be a lucky lottery winner and avoid increasing the difficulty level and eliminate the need for fancy equipment and energy burning all together -wouldn't that be more fair and efficient ways to utilize energy and resources ? At the same time avoiding the centralization of miners all together ??
But it would decrease the amount of competitiveness in mining. More number of miners will enter the market. Infact everyone would just leave everything and mine because its a "chance" that they might find some bitcoin out of this task with no increased efforts in technology. Along with making bitcoin decentralize it will eliminate its whole purpose to be used as currency.