Do all weeks of blocks take the same time to process?

3

Bitcoin is slowly synchronising

Synchronising the network... 78 weeks behind

Do all weeks of blocks take the same time to process? Or will recent blocks be slower because Bitcoin is more popular now?

It felt like going from '100 weeks behind' to '80 weeks behind' took longer than going from '200 weeks behind' to '100 weeks behind'

Colonel Panic

Posted 2013-09-28T19:51:40.820

Reputation: 133

Answers

3

It's the number of transactions that counts. The progress bar in recent versions of the reference client (0.8.2 and higher) uses an estimation of this, so it represents real time better.

Also, after the last checkpoint (block 250000, as of 0.8.5), signature checking is enabled, which requires significantly more CPU to validate.

Pieter Wuille

Posted 2013-09-28T19:51:40.820

Reputation: 54 032

Thanks. Just got to block 250K and my computer has starting making a lot of noise. – Colonel Panic – 2013-10-03T23:57:26.573

Asked: 2013-09-28T19:51:40.820

Viewed: 1 072 times

Active: 2013-09-28T23:02:57.347