"One consequence of this architecture was that submitting Gitcoins was decently slow — we weren't maintaining persistent connections to the backend gitcoin server, so there was a decent amount of overhead. We compensated for this by tuning the difficulty to ensure the time to mine a coin was large compared to the time to complete a push."
Interestingly, this is the reason Bitcoin confirmations are 10 minutes and not less: it gives plenty of time for new blocks to be broadcast to the majority of the network.
It's not currently a big issue since the maximum block size is 1 MB (50% propagation typically takes less than 10 seconds: http://bitcoinstats.com/network/propagation/) but to scale to Visa volumes block sizes will need to be increased to hundreds of megabytes.
It's also a reason why quicker confirmation times of Litecoin and Dogecoin aren't necessarily a good idea.
Interestingly, this is the reason Bitcoin confirmations are 10 minutes and not less: it gives plenty of time for new blocks to be broadcast to the majority of the network.
It's not currently a big issue since the maximum block size is 1 MB (50% propagation typically takes less than 10 seconds: http://bitcoinstats.com/network/propagation/) but to scale to Visa volumes block sizes will need to be increased to hundreds of megabytes.
It's also a reason why quicker confirmation times of Litecoin and Dogecoin aren't necessarily a good idea.