Speaking of whom, he refers to the accumulated proof of work on the bitcoin blockchain as a 'monument'.
The hashing is important because is ensures that certain amount of energy is used (wasted?? not in his opinion...) upon adding each block.
And each further block, adds more cumulative work (energy) on the chain, moving the security of the past transactions further towards 'immutable'.
In the early days the whole system would collapse with just one of todays ASIC mining machine working against it.
Of course the whole market cap back then would struggle to cover the miner's electricity bills...
The 10-min average target is (as well as controlling a set inflation rate) to ensure the network reaches consensus upon finding a block, and reduce the forks.
Make sure the nodes communicate the new block to the network before new blocks are found.
Some times you get small forks like that, usually they are resolved in 2 blocks. Highly unlikely scenarios have seen 6 block forks.
Satoshi surely did not know everything and could hardly predict 9 years into the future.
It is pointless to speculate on what Satoshi would do. For all we know he is still around making pull requests.
Bitcoin works like it is now, and we have many developers working on improving it.
Very easy. The whole thing is time stamped. So last valid block before the 10 mins are up would seem fine to me and would save an awful lot of electricity.
Ah, great idea... All we need is a central location and a central entity to confirm the last block before the timestamp, cant wait for the pull request!