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Comment by Jd | Hacker News Reader

There was also no evidence you could do sub one minute blocks for Proof-of-Work. Then Vitalik read the ghost paper and figured it out. Put enough very smart people working on hard problems and eventually they will figure some of them out.

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Of course you can do sub one minute blocks. Bitcoin chose 10 minute blocks to maximize decentralization. Bitcoin could also do 12 second blocks, but then the network would be as centralized as Ethereum.

Ethereum didn't just shorten block times, it uses a variant of the GHOST algorithm, which as originally proposed for Bitcoin as a way to speed up blocks and increase throughput while maintaining good decentralization and security.

Thanks for understanding me. Unfortunately my original comment seems to have been massively downvoted by uninformed HN readers.

Sure, uncle blocks help increase the weight of the chain but are also wasted blobs of data forever taking up space on the blockchain. They serve no value other than to make the PoW weighting heavier.

How does block time affect centralization?

I understand that more storage is a centralization pressure, but how does blocktime relate assuming the same number of transactions?

Because mining is dependent on the rate at which information can propagate across the network. If a mining pool is able to hear about the next block 1s sooner than another pool, it has a significant advantage when blocks only take 12s to mine. If blocks take 10min to mine, that 1s is less of an advantage.

If miners get paid for valid blocks that don't end up included in the chain, that also makes the 1s less of an advantage. Hence GHOST. Here's the original paper [1] and a later one [2].

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Accelerating-Bitcoin-s...

[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/545.pdf

Sure, maybe including uncle blocks can help secure the chain. It's not without cost, however: now you're forever persisting valueless blobs of data as part of your blockchain.

It's just an extra block header every few blocks, which is a minuscule amount of data compared to the transaction records. And it's not actually valueless since the uncles are part of the block selection algorithm and therefore contribute to security.

In this space it is very hard to tell the very smart people from the people who SEEM to be very smart. Getting that wrong can be expensive.

It’s hard, but it’s not that hard. Understanding Ethereum is much easier than inventing it was. The hard part has been done you just have to understand code that’s already been written and proposals that have already been made.

Again, not easy, but it’s the bread and butter of your first year in grad school: reading and understanding existing work. Ambitious undergrads are often doing this work quite professionally.

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