What is the benefit of having a fixed target block interval?

Asked Dec 26 '19 at 11:25

Active May 27 '21 at 07:05

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By design Bitcoin targets a block interval of 10 minutes.

How does the blockchain benefit from maintaining a bounded block time?

edited Jan 03 '20 at 03:32

Murch

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asked Dec 26 '19 at 11:25

stack acc

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Does this answer your question? Why was the target block time chosen to be 10 minutes? – Ugam Kamat Dec 26 '19 at 11:46
I am more worried about why the time is fixed, not specifically why it is 10 min? – stack acc Dec 26 '19 at 12:21

1 Answers1

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Block mining time is not fixed. 10 minutes is just average value which is aimed by difficulty adjustment algorithm to balance two contradicting requirements:

low transaction time requires low block mining time.
low probability to mine several different blocks simultaneously requires higher block mining time.

answered Dec 26 '19 at 18:11

Denis Rozhnev

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