Ten minutes is also too long for financial transactions where timing matters to get an asset at a particular price, and where latency exposes traders to time-based arbitrage weaknesses such as market timing attacks.6 The immediate solution for entrepreneurs has been to fork the bitcoin code base, that is, to modify the source code by tweaking a few parameters, and to launch a new blockchain with an altcoin in place of bitcoin as incentive to participate. Litecoin is a popular altcoin with a block time of 2.5 minutes, and Ripple and Ethereum are entirely reengineered blockchain platforms that
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