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Building Blockchain Projects

You're reading from   Building Blockchain Projects Building decentralized Blockchain applications with Ethereum and Solidity

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Product type Paperback
Published in Apr 2017
Publisher Packt
ISBN-13 9781787122147
Length 266 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Narayan Prusty Narayan Prusty
Author Profile Icon Narayan Prusty
Narayan Prusty
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Toc

Table of Contents (10) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Understanding Decentralized Applications FREE CHAPTER 2. Understanding How Ethereum Works 3. Writing Smart Contracts 4. Getting Started with web3.js 5. Building a Wallet Service 6. Building a Smart Contract Deployment Platform 7. Building a Betting App 8. Building Enterprise Level Smart Contracts 9. Building a Consortium Blockchain

Block time


The block difficulty formula we saw earlier uses a 10-second threshold to make sure that the difference between the time a parent and child block mines is in is between 10-20 seconds. But why is it 10-20 seconds and not some other value? And why there such a constant time difference restriction instead of a constant difficulty?

Imagine that we have a constant difficulty, and miners just need to find a nonce to get the hash of the block less and equal to the difficulty. Suppose the difficulty is high; then in this case, users will have no way to find out how long it will take to send ether to another user. It may take a very long time if the computational power of the network is not enough to find the nonce to satisfy the difficulty quickly. Sometimes the network may get lucky and find the nonce quickly. But this kind of system will find it difficult to gain attraction from users as users will always want to know how much time it should take for a transaction to be completed, just...

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