Bitcoin Killer Altcoin
The Bitcoin killer will thus have at least the following features.
- faster 1-confirmation block chain, e.g. 1 minute instead of Bitcoin's 10 min delay, if the orphan rate can be contained
A lot of altcoins can confirm in 30 seconds.
So why is bitcoins confirmation at 10 minutes?
Because that is the way it was created. It is essentially an arbitrary attempt to balance fast confirmations against the costs of orphaned blocks due to network latency.
Is a 10 minute confirmation a good thing or bad?
Yes.
Is it possible for bitcoins confirmation time to be sped up?
Technically possible? Yes.
Practicially possible? No.
Anything below 1 min for block confirmation will have like 10 to 30% stall rate.
The reason Bitcoin can't reliably lower the block confirmation time is because the network latency between full nodes can not be known to be below some value. As well the validation delay can be significant for some full clients, because we don't know the hardware they are running.
Here is the
discussion of and
the equation for the orphan (i.e. transactions stall) rate.
This problem is
theoretically solved in the holistic altcoin design I have proposed in the OP because fast network propagation and validation is assured by the design of the new hash, mini block chain account balances, mining only in pools to achieve the required anonymity while pools are prevented from being too large. I chose 1 minute to be conservative. I think this design could work reliably at 30 seconds or less. It could be lowered after
extensive testing to confirm my calculations.
Also
it may not be necessary to resend all transactions or separate the send from PoW header.
Edit to insert a followup:
Now, there isn't a snowballs chance in hell of all that happening on the blockchain in realtime.
That is not necessarily true. If the network propagation delay and validation time can be guaranteed to be fast enough, the block time can be lowered to what ever value the values allow for.
The issue is that full nodes would have to commit to having certain levels of connectivity and hardware. Essentially peers would need to talk directly (fully connected mesh network topology) to each other and so peers with low connectivity would suffer, but not the other peers. Thus the number of full nodes would need to be limited.
My insight is that the fully connected mesh connections between pools can be very high quality, while the connections between pools and their miners can be of varying quality. We should not look at pools as bad, rather we only need to limit their sizes so they don't overly centralized the network. Balance.
Payment processors also have to commit to certain high standards of connectivity and hardware.