This might be interesting in peercoin…
This comment posted on that thread gives a simple explanation it seems:
“His arguing that orphaned blocks equally contribute to the security of the blockchain. The only reason Satoshi didn’t make the confirmation time very short was because he didn’t have a solution to the orphaned blocks problem, which is what the paper presents.”
That would be interesting to get into a test branch of the Peercoin.
[sub]Yes, I’m optimistic it would hold up to peer review. And yes, I’m optimistic that it would be straight-forward to incorporate :)[/sub]
Perhaps if Peercoin wasn’t based around Proof-of-stake maybe.
We’re already protected against really long proof-of-work orphaned block chains.
I understand that, but I was anticipating that this method would be applicable for anything that used proof-of-work, even if that wasn’t the only network validation scheme.
Am I wrong to believe that the reason that Peercoin’s block generation time is set to 10 minutes is because any faster and the proof-of-work “side” of the protocol begins to run into problems that this would solve? Proof-of-stake generation, on the other hand, could be considerably quicker, if that was the only scheme.
If those assumptions are both true, would it not then follow that if Peercoin’s proof-of-work blocks could be reliably and securely generated at, say, 5 minutes per block, that proof-of-stake could correspondingly be made faster, as well?
Like the paper suggests, this would require a corresponding decrease in the block reward, so that the total inflation of M didn’t change.
Faster block times aren’t always a good thing. I’ve seen alt coins try that approach and it just frustrates miners and pool operators.
I’ll let someone else jump in here. 