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0 sats \ 13 replies \ @thrown 17 Oct 2022 \ parent \ on: I think we're all underestimating Bitcoin bitcoin
cool article, but it just begs the question of why not make the block time longer?
If 10 minutes is arbitrary, it is a little silly to say that Bitcoin encourages far away travel because of it’s block time.
10 minutes is not arbitrary, it's a design choice.
10 minutes was specifically chosen by Satoshi as a tradeoff between first confirmation time and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits. After a block is mined, it takes time for the other miners to find out about it, and until then they are actually competing against the new block instead of adding to it.
If someone mines another new block based on the old block chain, the network can only accept one of the two, and all the work that went into the other block gets wasted. For example, if it takes miners 1 minute on average to learn about new blocks, and new blocks come every 10 minutes, then the overall network is wasting about 10% of its work. Lengthening the time between blocks reduces this waste.
It's all about security. The 10 minute block time ensures more security for those transacting in the block.
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Lengthening the time between blocks reduces this waste.
So 12, or 15, or heck even 20 minute block times would have even less waste. You didn’t really answer why it’s not arbitrary. But it’s a good reply with good info anyway, so thank you.
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It's a trade off between security and speed.
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speed was deliberately kept slow to encourage a layer 2, right?
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You caught us.
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If you’re being sarcastic, I don’t know why. It was probably the correct move.
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Oh, sorry, I totally missed the context of your comment (that you replied to me).
It showed up in my notifications and for some reason I thought this is a dedicated post and thus thought this is a troll. Sorry again!
It wasn't kept slow. It was kept decentralized at all costs.
Scaling should happen on layers. If you just change the block size, you'll soon run into the same problem while having compromised decentralization; the whole purpose for a blockchain. So you essentially gained nothing.
Just look at the market cap of BCH or BSV.
This are only my 2 sats. There are better articles out there explaining much better why this was done.
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I see you are new to bitcoin. Please help us fix it, we really need your help!
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Avoiding the question lol. If you repeat that it’s not arbitary enough times, people will believe you!
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Its not arbitrary. Its based on several factors; some being:
- the slowness of onion protocols (privacy)
- the cap of 52GB/year growth of the blockchain
- the time it takes to relay a block to the DHT network
- the time it takes to download 1MB over an inexpensive internet connection (to reduce the head start big server farms would get)
- the time it takes to announce your block over an even slower connectino and blockhash (domestic internet uplinks are always slower than downlinks, and every miner is trying to solve a different subset of UXTOs, thus a different block).
Its not simply a matter of "lets just speed up or slow down the block rate" or "lets increase the block size" without tradeoffs at the expense of decentralization.
The fact is the blocktime or the blocksize doesn't really matter once its been set. The purpose of the bitcoin blockchain isn't to replace visa and mastercard, its to replace the movement of large amounts of value. It is to enable a trustless backbone upon which other trustless or moderate-trust transactions can take place such as with lightning or liquid.
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Ah thanks, you have a more detailed answer than me, haha
However, I think there are more points than just the one about waste of hashrate mentioned in the article (which references the bitcoin wiki) like not outpricing normal users from running a full node.
There are most likely more that I am missing.
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I don't think it's arbitrary. It must be slow enough for block propagation to work properly in a global network and the cost to run a full node for "normal users" not getting too high too fast due to storage tech not keeping up but fast enough to not stall transactions confirmation.
I think I read an article from the blocksize wars era explaining this. Can see if I can find it if you want.
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slow enough for block propagation to work properly in a global network and the cost to run a full node for "normal users" not getting too high too fast due to storage tech not keeping up
but fast enough to not stall transactions confirmation.
It’s kinda impossible to prove that 10 minutes isn’t arbitrary. It could have been 5, 7, 8, 12, 15, etc.
Fast enough to not stall transactions is not valid when talking about 10 minutes. They chose that specifically with the intention of building layer 2
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