Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development]Reducing the block rate instead of increasing the maximum block size

From: [email-masked]
Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 08:50:20 +0000

> So if the server pushes new block
> header candidates to clients, then the problem boils down to increasing
> bandwidth of the servers to achieve a tenfold increase in work
> distribution.

Most Stratum pools already do multiple updates of the header every block 
period,
bandwidth is really inconsequential, it's the latency that kills. At the 
present
time you are looking up to 15 seconds between the first and last pools 
to push
headers to their clients for the latest block. It's sort of 
inconsequential with
a 10 minute block time, but it cuts into a 1 minute one very heavily.

Some pools already don't do their own validation of blocks, but simply 
mirror
other pools, pushing them to be even more latency focused will just make 
this an
epidemic of invalidity rather than a solution.

> There are several proof-of-work cryptocurrencies in existence
> that have lower than 1 minute block intervals and they work just fine.
> First there was Bitcoin with a 10 minute interval, then was LiteCoin
> using a 2.5 interval, then was DogeCoin with 1 minute, and then
> QuarkCoin with just 30 seconds.

You can't really use these as examples of things going just fine. None 
of these
networks see anything approaching the Bitcoin transaction volume and 
none have
even remotely the same network size. Some Bitcoin forks use floats in 
consensus
critical code and work "just fine", for the moment. We can't justify 
poor
decisions with "but the altcoins are doing it".

Is there even a single study of the stale rates within these networks?