# Gavin Andresen
# 2013-02-04 17:17:08
# https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=140233.msg1503099#msg1503099

@s{quotedtext}
@s{quotedtext}
 @p{brk}
I think this is exactly the right thing to do. @p{par}

There is still the question of what the default behavior should be. Here is a proposal: @p{par}

Ignore blocks that take your node longer than N seconds to verify. @p{par}

I'd propose that N be:  60 seconds if you are catching up with the blockchain.  5 seconds if you are all caught-up.  But allow miners/merchants/users to easily change those defaults. @p{par}

Rationale: we should use time-to-verify as the metric, because everything revolves around the 10-minutes-per-block constant. @p{par}

Time-to-verify has the nice property of scaling as hardware gets more powerful. Miners will want to create blocks that take a reasonable amount of time to propagate through the network and verify, and will have to weigh "add more transactions to blocks" versus "if I add too many, my block will be ignored by more than half the network." @p{par}

Time-to-verify also has the nice property of incentivizing miners to broadcast transactions instead of 'hoarding' them, because transactions that are broadcast before they are in a block make the block faster to verify (because of the signature cache). That is good for lots of reasons (early detection of potential double-spends and spreading out the verification work over time so there isn't a blizzard of CPU work that needs to be done every time a block is found, for example). @p{par}