Many of the developers working on the project (not just the core team), along with several users, have expressed the view that the block time should be increased.

Some have suggested 2 minutes, some suggested longer times like 4 minutes or even 8 minutes (powers of two are more suitable than other numbers for technical reasons). Probably the most frequent suggestion has been "at least 2 minutes". I'm not naming names because I don't want to personalize the issue (it should be about the merits of the change) and if people want to come forward with their own views they can do so.

After some discussion, the prevailing (indeed perhaps unanimous) view among the developers supports a change to 2 minutes via the up coming hard fork in about six months. The block rewards would be adjusted accordingly to maintain the same rate of coin emission (twice as many coins per block so an equivalent number per day, etc.)

The trade offs are that confirmations will take longer of course, but confirmations will also be more trustworthy since they are less likely to be reorganized off the chain (currently there are many such reorgs per day, often a few per hour). On the positive side, the chain will be smaller, and syncing both a node and a wallet will be faster since there will be half as many blocks and half as many coinbase transactions to be stored and processed. During periods of low usage this means fewer empty blocks adding unnecessary overhead (and permanent chain size).

Perhaps the strongest reason to make this change is to guard against an increase in popularity (and the size of the network) causing the chain to become unstable. This has been seen on Bitcoin forks with 30 second blocks, where long chain (10 blocks or more) reorgs become extremely common and the network may fail to converge at all for long periods of time (or in theory permanently). Similar effects are seen to a lesser extent on BTC forks with 60 second blocks, and CryptoNote is somewhat more sensitive to the effects of reorgs, so staying at 60 seconds puts us in (or at best close to) a potential danger zone. The coins with the fastest block times that don't seem to commonly run into this trouble are the LTC-style 2.5 minute blocks.

Of course we don't know when or even if such an increase in popularity may happen, but if and when it does, we certainly want to have the foundation to support it (and much of the current development work on the whole project is intended to do so).

Questions and feedback are welcome.