I still believe that reducing the block generation time interval is a much more significant improvement.
Has there been any recent discussion about this?
No actually there is a lot more discussion on whether to increase block size or not to solve the unconfirmed transactions issues. I heard somewhere reducing block generation time interval is much more hard to implement than increasing block size.
i don't stay super up to date with the technical discussions but as far as i can tell this has never been seriously proposed by anyone, or with any of the potential forks. i kinda get the impression that 10 minutes is a good tradeoff for security reasons.
not one single other blockchain has ever reached a level where security is an actual issue so i dunno if any of these miracle block times actually hold up under real pressure.
As far as I understand it does not matter that much in terms of security, one hour of proof of work should give an equivalent amount of security mostly irrelevant of the block time, for example. However a single confirmation is much better then there being no confirmation at all on a transaction, even with a much faster block time, which is what makes quicker block times better, however a slower block time would give us human beings more time to respond if something goes wrong, that is certainly an argument that can be made in favor of a ten minute block time.
Reducing the block generation interval is not that much harder to implement, reducing the block interval and increasing the blocksize limit are both relatively easy to implement when compared to something like SegWit. If we where to increase the block interval to five minutes it would have the same effect as a two megabyte blocksize limit in terms of throughput, with the added advantage of quicker confirmation times. There is a good reason why most alternatives to Bitcoin have much faster block times, it makes these cryptocurrencies much better suited for uses as currency.
Ethereum currently has a fifteen second blocktime, the next iteration of Ethereum called Casper will have a three second blocktime, which will be fast enough for retail without the use of payment processors. Allowing for direct peer to peer commerce without any third parties or intermediaries, this philosophy is also why I favor on chain scaling as opposed to the Core road map of predominantly scaling off chain in Bitcoin, truth be told I do not even think the economics of off chain scaling is even viable, exactly because this competition exists.
I would support decreasing the block generation time, however in the current climate it is extremely difficult to implement any major changes to the Bitcoin protocol unless Wladimir approves it, who is the person within Core that has the final say over any code that goes into that implementation. This is why we need multiple implementations of Bitcoin competing with each other, so that we do not end up with such extreme centralization of development.
To answer your question more directly, there has not been much discussion about this, it has been mentioned a few times before over the years but as you can imagine in this environment it seems almost impossible to have such a change implemented. Which is in part why I consider Bitcoins development stagnant.
Part of the problem does lie in the community itself, the lack of a clearly defined governance mechanism has lead to a rift along ideological lines, in more extreme cases some people have even adopted ideologies that run contrary to how the protocol actually functions, promoting ideas of social consensus and immutability, which in my opinion run contrary to voluntarism. Some people, business and developers are moving over to alternatives, worsening the problem of the homogeneity of the culture within Bitcoin.
There is hope on the horizon from my perspective at least, the Bitcoin network will split, giving people the freedom of choice over these parameters. If more value spills over into these alternative genesis chains the miners will follow the value. The people can govern Bitcoin, we can even impeach our representatives (the miners), by changing the proof of work algorithm. Presently I support forking Bitcoin using the original SHA256 algorithm, since I do think that both chains can live side by side, just like Ethereum and Ethereum Classic do now. This way both sides can have the Bitcoin they want, that is true self determination and freedom. A graceful solution to an age old problem.
