Quote from: ArtForz on August 31, 2011, 01:13:54 PM

Quote from: jackjack on August 31, 2011, 12:37:44 PM

ITT: people think mining 6 1-minute blocks in a row is as difficult as mining 6 10-hours blocks in a row

Unless I missed something, then that's correct, but only if you interpret it in a certain way.
With the same relative hashpower vs. the rest of the network, over the same # of blocks, chances of finding X blocks in a row are the same, doesn't matter if avg. time/block is 10 seconds or 10 days.
But... wouldn't a theoretical attacker care more about how much time it takes to get a successful double-spend instead of how many blocks?

Either way you would have to put together 51% of the hashpower of the network to pull it off, I guess longer blocks could make the attack more inconvenient, but they would probably still do it if they had the capability.

Bottom line is this, ten minutes is too long. If you want to just keep trading these things among yourselves fine, if you want these to actually be widely used in the real world this problem has to be solved. And no I'm not letting anyone walk off with my stuff with zero confirmations, or even just one confirmation. And my customer isn't going to sit there for an hour to wait to leave with the stuff he's trying to buy. Bitcoin with 10 minute confirmations is a niche currency for certain internet transactions, at best.