Originally Posted by ladida

In any case, your ttl has 0 influence of when things will update, when other nameservers will update etc etc. Think of it this way, that might be more understandable to layman people like yourself.

You walk in a bank, teller asks you "how long can you wait" and you bring up an arbitrary number of time you can wait. Everyone walking in does the same. Does that influence when you will be called by the bank teller? Yea, to an extent where if there's 2 of you, one puts 10 mins, other 1 hr, you'll be called sooner. But that can be 10 mins, 20, 40, 1h, 3hr, or whenever the bank decides. If there's 10 of you with 10mins, it's going to decide by their own rules. For example, the guy that they know and does business 10 times more then you do will be called before you. And so on and so forth. So, while ttl does somewhat relate to the propagation, in reality, it's decided by 100 other different factors taht you have no control of, and all of those totally ignore your little paper where you wrote how long can you wait.