Quote from: aamarket on September 08, 2014, 09:07:44 AM

Everybody's so excited about 'superblock' - so I try to be a bit negativist.

I really doubt 30 minutes for record breaking 6tuple, the Riecoin network diff was more than 1700 ( I guess ), now it is less than 1450.
Please bear in mind it is exponentially difficult to find 6tuplets with higher diff ( I posted some rough estimation before ).

Is the network 'slowdown' for (possibly much more than) 30 minutes - and the need for everybody to update his clients -
really worth the risk of 'hard fork' problems ?

Do you have any math support for "30 minutes time to find superblock" other than "At current rates, I expect it would take about 30 mins" ?

I like Riecoin, and I wish all the best to it.

Sure! there's always math to be had when it comes to ric.
The assumption is that the difficulty raised to the ninth power is linear (6 because according to Hardy-Littlewood's k tuple conjecture the average space between 6 tuples is O(log^6 p), and 3 because testing for primality takes about O(log^3 p), so 6+3=9). This has been working nicely: the average time between blocks is about the expected 150 seconds, which means the assumption is working so far.

Current diff is 1441, but we want a block with 1857. So (1857/1441)^9 = 9.8 times harder. If we now have 2.5 minutes then 9.8 times harder would take 24.5 minutes (24.5 in average! it should be between 18.5 and 32 mins with 90% confidence, we have about 5% chance of it being more than 32 minutes and 0.2% of it taking more than an hour - this is calculated assuming we are following a Poisson process).
When difficulty was 1700, it would have been 1.7 times harder, meaning that choosing a block interval target of 5 minutes instead of 2.5 would have made us break the record a couple of months ago.