Quote from: Cricktor on Today at 12:33:05 PM

From what I remember, sorry a bit of faded memories, the first important metric for Satoshi was the block time target of 10min. It was likely a compromise but mainly focussed on security. To my knowledge a smaller block time, particularly in the beginning of the Bitcoin blockchain, would've had less security and stability (don't press me on that, though). The likelyhood of certain attacks rises with significantly shorter block time. Much larger than 10min isn't nice either, not in terms of security but user experience (nobody wants to wait too long for stable and secure confirmation of their transactions).

Yes, IIRC 10 minutes were considered the sweet spot between reliability and convenience, though satoshi erred more in favor of reliability. It was only with the first generations of alts that we found out how low block times can be pushed. Litecoin's 2.5 minutes worked fine while other alts that went to blocktimes of less than a minute tended to suffer from high orphan rates and reorgs. While later alts have been able to successfully go to blocktimes below one minute, they arguably could take lessons from earlier failed attempts.

The bigger question IMO would indeed be why satoshi then chose 210,000 blocks per halving period, resulting in the 4 years between each halving as pointed out by LoyceV. My pet theory has always been that satoshi had a hunch that 4 years would be the perfect interval for boom and bust hype cycles, ie. enough time for people to forget about Bitcoin and the pain of having bought at the top, but not so long as to completely drop out of the collective consciousness. But in hindsight it's of course always easy to see deliberate choice in what might have just been serendipity.