4
According to http://btc.blockr.io/ :
Height Block created Transactions Block fee Size (kb) Days destroyed
318525 2 minutes ago 28 0.00370000 8.36 kB 2.00
318524 3 minutes ago 64 0.00746243 25.76 kB 527.97
318523 4 minutes ago 140 0.02336649 67.67 kB 1,666.43
318522 2 minutes ago 16 0.00130000 4.64 kB 10.19
318521 8 minutes ago 359 0.05072184 205.02 kB 4,148.84
318520 16 minutes ago 92 0.01266343 49.22 kB 112.75
318519 7 minutes ago 128 0.01682150 54.51 kB 2,146.34
318518 20 minutes ago 137 0.02128600 86.23 kB 1,213.50
318517 24 minutes ago 657 0.10664839 353.93 kB 6,502.12
So during the past 24 minutes, 9 blocks have been found. One would expect this time to be approximately an hour and a half (90 minutes).
- How is this explained? Why is the block generation process currently running so fast?
- Is it safe to assume that the 6 confirmations, which took less that 10 minutes, implies an irreversible transaction?
1One possibility is chance; another is that a significant amount of hashing power has joined the network since the last difficulty adjustment. It would be an interesting exercise to compute the probability of this happening randomly. If you look at a larger number of block times (say 100), do you see the same thing? – Nate Eldredge – 2014-09-01T01:16:35.013
So how does this work? Let's say that some new miners get online for the first time and their hashing power is equal to the 25% of the total hashing power until the moment they joined the network, what would happen then? The probability of this happening randomly is very interesting indeed. No, in large number of blocks the average time between block generation is rather consistent, what I described above only happen at times. – Doug Peters – 2014-09-01T02:37:54.767
When 25% more power comes online, the average block time will drop to 1/1.25 = 80% of its previous value, until the next difficulty adjustment. The size and frequency of fluctuations from the average are the interesting part. – Nate Eldredge – 2014-09-01T02:45:16.910
That's interesting.. So what mining power should have joined the network during the times that the above blocks were found? For an average of say 8 minutes that's 1/3 of the normally expected time, in other words according to your formula 200% more power should have come online, which hardly is the case IMO. It hasn't been recorded in blockchain.info's graphs either: https://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=30days&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= so what really happened during that time?
– Doug Peters – 2014-09-01T13:49:15.9601The 200% number would assume that the blocks you observed represent average behavior. But since you don't see the same pattern over a longer time, I think we have to reject that assumption. It may be a combination of additional hashing power and chance - estimating how much of each will require the aforementioned computation. – Nate Eldredge – 2014-09-01T19:01:44.500
@NateEldredge I wanted to answer this, but the answer is already in your comments. I think it would be neat if you added a calculation, but otherwise your asnwer is still valid and should be accepted. – Jori – 2014-09-03T10:16:20.030
related: What is the expected time until the next block is found?, time between two block were create not approximately 10 min?
– Murch – 2014-09-07T07:33:39.050