Quote from: jonald_fyookball on March 20, 2014, 11:19:34 PM

Quote from: MoonShadow on March 20, 2014, 08:38:59 PM

Quote from: Bit_Happy on March 20, 2014, 07:23:19 PM

I Love BTC, but any honest look has to reveal that the transactions take WAY to long.

Transactions average 1.4 seconds from anywhere to anywhere. Transaction clearing is what blocks are doing. Transaction clearance for credit cards take between 30 and 45 days.

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Did Satoshi ever comment on why he used ~10 minutes per block and/or did he consider a much lower number?

Yes he did. He chose the 10 minute interval because it was a long enough period to prevent orphaned blocks, most of the time, due to more than one node discovering a block solution within the time period it takes to propagate a block from one edge of the network to the other. He was assuming that, in a future that Bitcoin was wildly successful, blocks would be very large data sets and the p2p network would be very large; both contributing to network delays that might extend the time for a block to propogate from edge to edge for up to a whole minute. Therefore, in order to limit the risk of orphaned blocks (and the blockchain splits that often accompany them) the target interval had to be several times longer than the worst case scenario for block propogation delays. He also wanted the interval to fit neatly into human time cycles for our mental convience. He could have done a 6 min block interval, for 10 per hour, but he was concerned that wouldn't be enough. His fears seem correct, because even with the 10 minute interval we average about 1.5% of blocks released onto the network are orphaned. A 6 minute interval would make that much worse, and 2 minute interval would make that rate simply awful.

The more I learn about Bitcoin, the more amazed I am by Satoshi's forward thinking.

I've said many time before, that Satoshi (if only one person) was a polymath. If you look deep into how bitcoin works, there are so many moving parts that just mesh so well and interlock, it seems so improbable that anyone could have gotten this all right the first try, but that's what happened. The system is so elegant, and subtle in so many ways. Many of these alt-coins don't recognize these subtle metrics, and assume that too many things are simply arbitrary. I've found that there are few things that were arbitrary about bitcoin.