It would be great if people could be rewarded more frequently. As you say, it’s a psychological thing. My NuShares mint multiple times every day and it’s always nice to see the reward pop up. With Peercoin it takes me days to mint, which is also pretty frequent, but it’s only because I own a lot of coins. I can only imagine what it must be like for people with a small amount of coins, as it can take months or even a year to mint. When it takes so long, it gives off the appearance that nothing is happening and it isn’t as exciting.
However, at the same time Otzi is correct. The only way to increase the number of times you mint throughout the year would be to increase the number of blocks the network puts out each year, which would require increasing the frequency of blocks from 10 minutes to a shorter time frame. Nu is able to reward minters so often because it has 1 minute blocks, which gives the network many more opportunities each minute to reward minters.
Increasing the frequency of blocks carries a lot of negatives with it, most which Otzi already mentioned above. The only good thing I can see come out of such a change is improving minting incentive. Even then, it’s not an actual improvement, since you would end up receiving the same reward throughout the year whether Peercoin had 10 minute or 1 minute blocks. The improvement is in perception only. You are getting rewarded more frequently, which has a positive psychological effect, even though in reality you’re receiving the same reward as you would if the rewards were more spread out over time. A more frequent reward would also encourage people to leave their client minting 24/7.
Besides improving minting incentive, people think that shorter block times are necessary for mainstream adoption because they believe people will want fast transaction speeds. While it’s true that mainstream adoption won’t occur without transaction speeds on par with or faster than what they’re already used to with credit card networks, they’re looking at the wrong solution. The answer is not in making blockchains run faster. The answer is in building 3rd party off-chain networks that are capable of supporting high capacity instantaneous transaction processing that work in conjunction with on-chain networks. These 3rd party networks would basically make a profit out of servicing the Peercoin blockchain.
It is impossible for blockchains with a primary focus on high speed on-chain transactions to scale to the level of credit card networks while also remaining decentralized. Blockchains are just not designed to perform the role of transaction processing at such a large scale. They are however well designed to secure a decentralized ledger and its account balances, so the primary focus of blockchains should be to cheaply secure wealth in a distributed form.
On-chain transactions should still be possible, but they need to be expensive enough to discourage regular use. People who still want to transact on-chain using the decentralized security of the blockchain will need to pay the fee for doing so. If they can’t afford to regularly pay such a large fee, then they will need to use 3rd party off-chain networks. The blockchain will continue to secure wealth, but the majority of people will use 3rd parties to actually transact with their coins. This setup will keep blockchains decentralized while off-loading the majority of transactions onto 3rd parties.
Anyway, the main point is that increasing block frequency would improve minting incentive and perception, but the negatives of doing so probably outweigh the benefits. It’s also the wrong solution to increase transaction speeds, that is if you care at all about keeping your network decentralized.
