Why would there be a need for some specialized token, wouldn’t it only make it harder to reason about incentives? What if the token/BCH price ratio would suddenly change, what happens with our incentives?
Why would the blocks be small? With 1/40 subdivision we’d have 15s subs and their sub-blocksizelimit would start at 800kB. The sub-blocks are not just PoW without TXs - they will contain as many TXs as they can!
The same incentives for linear chain work here the same, and you subdivide everything as if changing the block time: you subdivide blocksize limit, block reward, difficulty by 1/40, each sub-block gets its own header, nonce, and merkle root, and miners mostly mine a linear chain:
(N) <-- N+S1 <-- N+S2 ... N+S39 <-- (N+1)
The legacy header & coinbase TX of (N+1) can still emit exactly 3.25 BCH in that TX, but the TX would be required to have outputs to all the miners who won the sub-blocks referenced by the summary block and they’d each get 1/40. If it so happens that 2 blocks referencing the same height are found, then it just changes the proportions somewhat - to give more to those on the longest subchain and a little less to those on the sides. Not sure if there’s some penalty for non-chain structures, in which case some BCH could be explicitly burned to an OP_RETURN in the coinbase TX and it will still all look normal from PoV of old block explorers etc.
Anyway, if you’re concerned about impact on emission, know that miners can already opt to get less than what emission allows, and they already lost some BTC/BCH to the void this way (Coins never even created! It’s different from creating and then burning), so our max. theoretical supply is already down to 20999821.02921183 BCH.
So in any case emission stays the same from consensus PoV, while incentives work for the benefit of all: both users and miners.
Yeah that’s the difference you can read from one table above, so not much difference when main blocks are 10 minutes apart. Chains with shorter block times would benefit relatively more - but they’d still have higher orphan rates than a chain with 10 minute main blocks.
What’s important here is that it’s not reduced, and we get 15s sub-confirmations!
Researchers had actually spun up a full blockchain network, a code fork of BCH:
I don’t know if the network is still active. Also, BU’s Nexa team plans to implement it, although they did not yet make any announcements about when.