A Lower Block Time Could Help Bitcoin Scale, But Will It Work?

A small tweak to bitcoin could have a big impact.
This has been the central point of contention in bitcoin’s “block size debate“, a long-running dispute over whether to lift a hardcoded limit on the amount of data that can be included in each block of transactions.
One side sees increasing the block size as an easy way to boost the number of transactions processed on the network, potentially expanding bitcoin’s user base. Those opposed to the move worry about the consequences (think centralization and instability) of such a change, or at least question the need to lift the block size in the near-term.
There are other pieces to bitcoin that can be changed or moved around, and any change can make a big difference for the overall health of the network – good or bad.
One data-heavy presentation from the developer conference Scaling Bitcoin earlier this month explored how changing parameters can affect the network, like how a tweak to the frequency at which blocks are created might be one way to easily grow transaction capacity.
Using data pulled from their open source simulator of a proof-of-work blockchain (bitcoin and ethereum are two such blockchains), researchers from ETH Zrich argued that bitcoin could securely reduce its block time from 10 to 1 minute.

This post was published at Coin Desk on October 26, 2016.