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So there are a lot of cryptocurrencies that tries to improve on Bitcoin's 1 Mb block size limit and 10 minute block time (6MB per hour) by using faster block times or larger block size limits. For example litecoin has 1 Mb block size limit and block time is 2.5 minutes (24MB per hour). Dogecoin has 500kb block size limit and block time is 1 minutes (30 MB per hour).

Is there any cryptocurrency that does the opposite and uses either a longer block time or a smaller block size, with the intention of limiting blockchain growth?

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    It seems like a better approach to preventing the blockchain from getting bigger would be to have unspent transaction output commitments on a regular basis. I know that NXT does this.
    – Nick ODell
    Commented Jul 4, 2015 at 3:38
  • can you expand on this? are you talking about "checkpoints"
    – k kurokawa
    Commented Jul 4, 2015 at 17:03

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I am not aware of any cryptocurrency that has block times of greater than 10 minutes, but I am very familiar with the desire to limit growth of the block chain.

Monero recently increased its block time from 1 to 2 minutes in part for the reason you mentioned (but also in part to reduce the # of orphan blocks which occur more frequently when block times are very short)

Monero uses an adaptive blocksize that automatically scales based on blockchain usage.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/45b8qn/my_journey_to_finding_monero_and_some_questions/czwlcdb

A quadratic penalty is imposed such that block subsidy = base subsidy * ((block size / median size of last 400 blocks) - 1)², with the penalty being applied after you build a block larger than the median size. The maximum block size is 2*median size. Because subsidy is based around the number of coins in existence, the 'burned' subsidy is deferred to be paid out to future blocks.

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