3 ms·

For the same reasons that they made it 10 min rather than less to begin with [1] [1] http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/1863/why-was-the-target-block-t

• DennisP 11y ago
  Right, bigger blocks take longer to propagate so you get more forking with a block that's too big compared to the time interval. This might change if Gavin's IBLT proposal [0] gets implemented. Basic idea is that the miners have most of the transactions already (otherwise they couldn't mine), so you don't have to transmit them again in the block itself. You just need a small fixed-size data structure that lets miners reconstruct the full block from the transactions they have already. Another idea is GHOST [1], which shortens the block time by letting all the forks take part in the consensus process, and get rewarded even if they don't end up in the final linear chain. It was proposed as a Bitcoin modification but just got its first production launch with Ethereum. [0] https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2 https://gist.github.com/gavinandresen/e20c3b5a1d4b97f79ac2 [1] https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf https://eprint.iacr.org/2013/881.pdf
  • pstrateman 11y ago
    > This might change if Gavin's IBLT proposal [0] gets implemented. Such a thing already exists, blocksize has little to no effect on propagation time to other miners. http://bitcoinrelaynetwork.org/ http://bitcoinrelaynetwork.org/ Edit: not that this is not IBLT but another actually implemented setup