Creating An Altcoin: How to Lower or Increase Confirmation Times?

Question

When Creating an Altcoin for fun, what variable/attribute do I change in main.cpp file to increase/lower the time it takes for confirmations to take place?

Also can the confirmation times be changed again after coin is re-compiled/re-built?

Thanks.

Answer 1

See the variable nTargetSpacing. The difficulty adjustments will try to steer the average block time towards this value (in seconds).

You can't change this at runtime. In fact, you can't easily change it at all once you've released your coin. All clients on the network need to agree on this number, since it is used to calculate the required difficulty. If you change it after release, then there will be a disagreement between old and new clients as to whether various blocks are valid, and your coin will have a hard fork.