Quote from: wizeman on July 19, 2010, 05:48:33 PM

How do you get thousands of computers to agree when is the 10 minute mark?

Ideally you want the algorithm to rely on synchronized clocks as little as possible.

Another problem is that if you'd use your strategy, at every 10 minute mark the network would be swamped with a flood of candidate blocks.

Just making a presumption on this particular issue, and I don't have any sort of commentary on what would be a "triggering" event to create these kind of blocks, but here is at least a strategy to keep the network from getting completely bogged down with candidate blocks:

Each potential candidate would obviously have some sort of "fitness" metric to suggest which one is more "fit" than another. If you are generating a block and the "event" trigger occurs, that node would "broadcast" its candidate to all of its immediate neighbors.... and keep track of which "neighbor" (direct connection to another node) has already had that candidate block transmitted. It only gets transmitted once to a neighbor (with acknowledgment).

When a node starts to receive candidate blocks, it would perform this "fitness" test and either dump the current block (it has failed a fitness test) or keep the block.... continuing to contact adjacent nodes that have not yet acknowledged receiving the candidate block. If a new candidate is found that is more fit, it wouldn't re-transmit back to the original source of that block (whatever direct connection sent that block), but it would try to share that with other nodes. If the node receives the same block from a neighbor, it would consider that node to have also acknowledged the block until all neighbors are essentially working with the same block.

While it would be chaotic at first, the network would calm down very quickly in this situation and settle upon a new block that would be ultimately accepted into the chain.

I do agree that the main triggering event would be the big problem with this kind of scheme, and that would imply some sort of centralized timekeeper to create the events. I also think that such an event driven block creation system would ultimately give out about the same number of "new" coin blocks as the current system, and it would create much more network bandwidth trying to negotiate "winner". It would also introduce scaling problems that currently don't exist in the current network.