Bitcoin's ten-minute block confirmation time surfaces whenever someone first learns about the system. Transactions travel across the network instantly, yet the chain only adds blocks every ten minutes
Bitcoin's ten-minute block confirmation time surfaces whenever someone first learns about the system. Transactions travel across the network instantly, yet the chain only adds blocks every ten minutes in normal conditions. This creates a practical hassle for anyone considering everyday use. A ten-minute wait—sometimes longer—to pay for coffee at Starbucks doesn't work in retail settings.
Altcoin developers responded to this complaint by building faster networks. They advertised quicker confirmations as their main innovation over Bitcoin. Charlie Lee, creator of Litecoin, made this argument central to his pitch. But established developers in the space push back. Peter Todd, who works on Bitcoin Core, considers this obsession with speed a distraction from deeper issues.
Todd addressed altcoins with faster blocks at the Anarchapulco Conference earlier in the year. He had serious reservations about projects built on this single feature. He explained that confirmation time has a direct relationship with network security. Changes here represent a tradeoff that shouldn't be made lightly: "I think faster confirmations is a pretty silly thing to be doing because confirmations times [are] a tradeoff between the security of your coin and also convenience. The altcoins that try to push this down to, say, 1 minute 30 seconds — they're making their coins much less secure because it now means if you're a mining pool with more hashing power, you earn proportionally more money than if you're a smaller pool. That difference becomes more and more extreme as the block age role gets smaller and smaller and your proximity to other miners, as well as your size, becomes more and more important for your profitability."
Cutting from ten to one minute doesn't address the real user expectation, though. Cashiers want five-second confirmations, Todd noted, which no system can deliver: "Ten minutes is a very conservative number — and equally like one minute. One minute is still a long time to wait for most applications. If I'm trying to go pay in bitcoins for a donut, the cashier wants me to get out of there in like five seconds; they don't want to wait that long. Yet, five seconds will never be something that Bitcoin can guarantee, [nor] any system like it."
When the topic turned to Dash's instant transaction capability, Todd rejected the whole concept. Blockchains cannot move that fast to reach consensus, he argued: "I guarantee you Dash's instant transactions is going to end up broken some time. We're not going to see it — probably because nobody actually uses it. But, you just can't have a decentralized system that comes to consensus that fast. It's not going to happen." His skepticism extended beyond just speaking. On Twitter in July, Todd made his position blunt: ".@TheRektoning Without a doubt I'd choose @monerocurrency over @Dashpay – the latter is snakeoil, the former genuine crypto. — Peter Todd (@petertoddbtc) July 17, 2015"
The altcoin market continues to occupy space in Bitcoin's ecosystem through 2015, yet confusion persists among prominent developers. Some people in the community believe altcoins offer real competition. The consensus among experienced developers, though, treats them as speculation vehicles or testing grounds for new ideas.
