News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:A protocol for storing up to 1277 bytes in the Bitcoin bl... by brighton36 on Thursday October 15, 2015 @01:32PM (#10394573)
As for the 12 second block time, that's a bug not a feature. If you don't know why, you should spend some time looking into it.
Re:A protocol for storing up to 1277 bytes in the Bitcoin bl... by aakilfernandes on Thursday October 15, 2015 @01:47PM (#10394699)
I did a quick google but didn't find anything. Mind giving me a link or at least a summary?
Re:A protocol for storing up to 1277 bytes in the Bitcoin bl... by brighton36 on Thursday October 15, 2015 @02:01PM (#10394810)
Here's a start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n0fHpQV9wHo

tldr: longer reorgs and less energy mean less security. Which, is presumably the reason to even use a blockchain

Re:A protocol for storing up to 1277 bytes in the Bitcoin bl... by aakilfernandes on Thursday October 15, 2015 @09:25PM (#10396999)
A response from Vitalik with actual numbers https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/38jiyv/are_ethere...

> Okay, fine, under normal conditions bitcoin blocks are 98% likely to be final but ethereum blocks are 80% likely to be final. However, six bitcoin blocks provide a one minus one in a billion finality guarantee (since 0.02 6 < 10-9) and 13 ethereum blocks provide that same guarantee (0.2 13 < 10-9), so it's still the case that what bitcoin provides in 60 minutes, ethereum provides in 156 seconds. Sure, not in six blocks, but it's a battle of linear versus exponential, so the more fine-grained you can make the single-block confirmation time the better.

There are also uncle rewards which mitigate the miner incentives.

I see benefits to both systems and longer block times are clearly more efficient, but since Ethereum is an application platform a 10 minute block time is untenable. It may be less efficient, but I don't think thats a nail in the coffin.