0 sats \ 1 reply \ @thrown 17 Oct 2022 \ parent \ on: I think we're all underestimating Bitcoin bitcoin
Avoiding the question lol. If you repeat that it’s not arbitary enough times, people will believe you!
write
preview
10 sats \ 0 replies \ @Brunswick 17 Oct 2022
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.
reply