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Questions tagged [block-interval]

Questions concerned with the expected or actual time between the discovery of two blocks.

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How many blocks per second can sustainably be created using a time warp attack?

In a time warp attack, an attacker can reduce proof of work difficulty to its minimum, which allows even a single piece of modern mining equipment to create large numbers of blocks per second. ...
David A. Harding's user avatar
1 vote
3 answers
55 views

Can multiple candidate blocks be mined concurrently by the miner, even if at the end only one block gets added to the chain every 10 mins?

I read that every 10 minutes, the miner would fetch txs from the tx_mempool, process them, create a candidate block, do the proof of work and then broadcast it to the network. Does this mean that the ...
Geek's user avatar
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0 votes
1 answer
26 views

Question about bitcoin transaction minted time

Book "mastering bitcoin" 3rd edition, on page 26, there is one statement as following: "Approximately five minutes after the transaction was first transmitted by Alice’s wallet, a miner ...
fa william's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
36 views

Is this possible to roughly estimate when next N blocks will be generated from now?

I have a lightning node running locally. For some events in the future (e.g. when a pending channel will be closed) it shows such values: "blocks_til_maturity": 107. It means that when block ...
Sergei Basharov's user avatar
8 votes
2 answers
1k views

How would faster blocks cause mining centralization?

I've heard that faster blocks would cause mining to become more centralized. How do these things fit together?
Murch's user avatar
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1 answer
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do miner hashrates vary during block production?

When a block is mined, the remaining mempool txs can be mined into a new block. Is there a difference in blocktime between accepting all streaming mempool txs into the mining block and sticking with ...
tlr's user avatar
  • 101
1 vote
1 answer
268 views

Bitcoin alpha version with 15 minutes block time interval

In alpha software prior to Bitcoin's release, the target interblock interval was 15 minutes, and it was reduced to 10 minutes for release. https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/56nk94/...
user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
64 views

What is the lowest number of blocks mined in a day?

There were only 67 blocks mined on the 2021-06-27 (UTC). Is this the lowest number of blocks we have ever seen in a day? Or have we seen numbers counts in the past?
user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
697 views

Why can the block production rate be as low as two per hour?

Why is it taking so long to mine a single block. Like last hour only 2 blocks have been mined. Currently been 45 min since the last block was mined. According to blockchair Hour Blocks 5 ***** ...
Nicc Bars's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
116 views

Why does the halving event take place every 4 years?

So, as per my understanding - bitcoin halving takes place when 210,000 blocks are mined. And blocks contain transactions - and they contain the same number of transactions (more or less). So, as the ...
Md Mushahid Khan's user avatar
3 votes
2 answers
166 views

What are some pitfalls of having 1 minute blocktimes? What vulnerabilities would this introduce?

For example, dogecoin has 1 minute blocktimes and they seem to be doing fine for the past 5 years. What are some issues they might run into with 1 minute blocktimes and increased adoption? What other ...
Patoshi パトシ's user avatar
2 votes
2 answers
133 views

Can we look at how long it took to solve for the most recent block in the blockchain? (and how?)

For example, can we see, the latest block, somebody got lucky and solved it in 1 minute, but then the next block, nobody solved it until 18 minutes later? (and how can we see it?)
nonopolarity's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
61 views

How come this formula predicts more than four years to the next halving?

So I was looking at https://www.binance.vision/halving and it shows that their formula for halving is (Halving block height - Next block height) * Average time between blocks - estimated time until ...
swoopy's user avatar
  • 121
3 votes
2 answers
119 views

Why do we often see 2 blocks mined within a few seconds of each other?

This seems to happen far more frequently than one would expect from a Poisson distribution with a ~10 minute mean. Am I just bad at statistics or is something else going on?
deezy's user avatar
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0 answers
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Fork rate range in terms of network security

I am really new to bitcoin and am trying to understand the basics. Fork rate/Orphan rate is a measure of network security. The higher the fork rate, the more compromised the system. Also fork rate ...
AAKASH IYER's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
113 views

What is the benefit of having a fixed target block interval?

By design Bitcoin targets a block interval of 10 minutes. How does the blockchain benefit from maintaining a bounded block time?
stack acc's user avatar
5 votes
3 answers
166 views

Are there any "slow" sidechains? What are the tradeoffs?

Are there any examples of sidechains which target a block time much longer than bitcoin? Could a sidechain be made "slow enough" such that the size of a proof (SPV proof?) for it could actually fit ...
philbw4's user avatar
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2 votes
2 answers
2k views

What is the formula for inferring hash rate from difficulty and block frequency?

Two parts to this question 1/ There have recently been concerns over drops in hash rate observed on sites such as blockchain.com. However, my understanding is that hash rate is inferred from the ...
AdaptiveAnalysis's user avatar
3 votes
3 answers
368 views

Why not speed up block mining?

After reading Why is increasing block size in the Bitcoin network considered to decrease security?, I have a follow-up question about increasing block sizes: why do we not reduce the difficulty of PoW?...
Thibault Santonja's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
88 views

Which is the better estimator for future mining intervals, the 10 minute protocol target or the observed, historical average?

The Bitcoin protocol is designed so that the network difficulty is periodically adjusted so that new blocks are mined on average every 10th minute. However, looking back the last 10 years, it appears ...
Magnus's user avatar
  • 145
21 votes
5 answers
12k views

Shortest and Longest block interval time ever recorded in Bitcoin

Bitcoin block interval time is on average 10 minutes, that is the difficulty is adjusted in such a way that every 10 minutes a miner will manage to find the right hash. This is just an average time ...
Rexcirus's user avatar
  • 381
3 votes
3 answers
319 views

Why we need mining?

I know is related to these: What is the rationale behind Bitcoin mining? Why do we need Proof of Work in bitcoin? But I don't fully understand those answers, and I think usually is much easier to ...
Enrique's user avatar
  • 301
3 votes
2 answers
1k views

How are block interval, block size and effective throughput related?

I have two questions: Why does the effective throughput (as defined below) decreases when the block interval is decreased? How does a reduction in the block size results in maintaining a high ...
Tom Gijselinck's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
513 views

Calculating Hashrate / Threads correlating to Average Block Time

Wondering if anyone can provide some detailed fact based information on how pool mining using Fixed Difficulty affects the probability of N number of shares found over T time given the variables X ...
McFlySoHigh's user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
1k views

Why does bitcoin mining take so long?

I was wondering that a block (Here's a Block #506398) It's nonce is 1,229,291,212 (A little over a billion), Then why does it take so long to mine a block because my system alone can do about 500 GH/...
Rishi Kataria's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
258 views

Why are Bitcoin transactions sometimes confirmed instantly if blocks are mined every 10 minutes?

I have a basic question on Bitcoin and blockchain: Sometimes transactions are confirmed almost instantly, but there should be a new block every 10 minutes, so how is it possible? A transaction can be ...
Rhinoted's user avatar
0 votes
2 answers
186 views

How does mining work on the moving target (variables change every second)?

In bitcoin, miners hash the header twice with the SHA256 function. This header consists of the fields listed below: version (v) previousHashBlock (p) merkleRoot (m) time (t) difficulty (d) nonce (n) ...
Prostak's user avatar
  • 103
2 votes
1 answer
78 views

What happens if the block's generated are exactly 10 minutes?

My understanding is that every 2016 blocks, the average block time is taken. If it is less than 10 minutes, network ramps up the difficulty. Is there a possibility where the average block time is ...
Nona Shah's user avatar
  • 101
4 votes
3 answers
401 views

Why not implement GHOST in bitcoin?

GHOST can provide higher transaction throughput by minimized block interval, but community people seldom mention it. What's wrong with GHOST?
Anderson's user avatar
  • 245
1 vote
0 answers
73 views

Reducing block generation time [duplicate]

Is there any drawback to reducing the time it takes to generate POW, essentially reducing block generation time and confirming transactions faster. What if the difficulty is reduced so that the POW ...
Kevin's user avatar
  • 67
3 votes
0 answers
433 views

Probability of Orphaned Blocks

This is a question regarding the probability of orphaned blocks depending on the block interval. I am using Bitcoin vs Litecoin as an example. Assuming equal hash rate and number of transactions, ...
Phibert's user avatar
  • 131
2 votes
2 answers
981 views

Why not decrease the difficulty to increase capacity?

There is a persistent debate in Bitcoin about increasing the capacity. The popular idea seems to be to increase the blocksize from its current 1MB to push through more transactions per block. But ...
abelenky's user avatar
  • 1,344
2 votes
1 answer
1k views

How to calculate block generation time from block's data?

I'm working on paper Double-Spending Attacks on Fast Payments in Bitcoin. And I see they give out the result : block generation time is approximately 10 minutes (9 minutes and 54 seconds), the ...
phuong's user avatar
  • 121
2 votes
1 answer
783 views

Probability that a block will be confirmed in x minutes

I know that a block usually takes 10 minutes on average to get confirmed. But what is the probability that this will happen? I mean is there any formula that we can use to calculate the probability ...
Mije's user avatar
  • 21
5 votes
1 answer
815 views

How does mining process takes Approximately 10 minutes?

I don't think that I fully understood the "difficulty" topic in blockchain, and therefore I don't understand how mining process takes close to 10 minutes. If I have "Target" value (some hash value, ...
Roy Kuper's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
153 views

Is it possible to reduce the block interval in the future?

Is it possible in future to reduce the confirmation time of the transactions? Can it somehow be reduced to less than 10 minutes? Can it be made faster?
Rashul Gupta's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
272 views

Why not multiply "six confirmations" and divide Time-Between-Blocks and Reward by the same factor?

It seems that choosing a good factor to use to expand Bitcoin's capacity is a good idea. The software would divide some of its calculated values by this factor, such as the target time between blocks ...
Dave Scotese's user avatar
6 votes
2 answers
270 views

Can a blockchain from the future be synchronized today?

If one or a few computers with blockchains from a future time line were connected to the Internet today, what would happen? This other question in Worldbuilding focus on possible consequences, but ...
Armfoot's user avatar
  • 161
0 votes
1 answer
484 views

The probability of block generation by two miners in a special case?

If network would include 2 mining pools (pool_1 and pool_2) with the hashpower of 49% and 51%,respectively, then wo want to calculate the probability that in 10 minutes, exactly 2 blocks would be ...
Questioner's user avatar
  • 1,126
1 vote
1 answer
340 views

The probability that the entire network generates at least two blocks within 10 minutes?

We know that Bitcoin network on average generates one block per 10 minutes. Is there a formula to compute the probability that the entire network generates at least two blocks within 10 minutes by ...
Questioner's user avatar
  • 1,126
3 votes
2 answers
441 views

How do you answer the question "Why 10 mins?" for beginners?

I'm often asked "Why is the average mining time about 10 mins?". How do you answer this question if you are asked by beginners?
Satoshi Nakanishi's user avatar
15 votes
1 answer
825 views

What is the largest number of blocks that have ever occurred in 1 hour?

I have see questions about the longest delay between blocks and am aware of some blocks that occur in short succession. However I rarely see many blocks occurring very close to each other (which I ...
Jun Li's user avatar
  • 396
1 vote
3 answers
3k views

Who decides that the new block is ready to hash?

I know that new blocks are relayed one block per 10 minutes but that time is not exact but average so: Who decides that the new block is ready to hash?
Sebastian Xawery Wiśniowiecki's user avatar
10 votes
3 answers
1k views

Why is Poisson instead of Negative Binomial used for computing attacker's potential progress?

In chapter 11 of the Satoshi's paper it is claimed that: The recipient waits until the transaction has been added to a block and z blocks have been linked after it. He doesn't know the exact ...
Carlos Pinzón's user avatar
4 votes
3 answers
390 views

Could Bitcoins (or any other blockchain based cryptocurrency) feasibly ever be used for purchases that need to go through fast?

Today, one of the problems with cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin is that it takes quite some time for a transfer to go through and enough confirmations to take place. This really isn't a problem when it ...
Speldosa's user avatar
  • 141
5 votes
1 answer
551 views

Why is a short blocktime considered to be unsafe?

I've heard a couple of times "a shorter blocktime is unsafe," (first about Litecoin and now Ethereum) but never understood why. Is it the higher probability of a fork? Why do some people consider a ...
Steve Ellis's user avatar
  • 1,072
4 votes
2 answers
433 views

Will a new block be found immediately, when there are enough transactions to fill a block?

I am trying understand the Bitcoin verification process. What happens, if a new block has not been found and there are enough transactions waiting to fill the current block size limit? Will a new ...
Prasad's user avatar
  • 43
3 votes
0 answers
58 views

What is the minimal block time practically possible? [duplicate]

There have been so many altcoins that experimented with parameters like block-time, and I was wondering what turned out to be the minimal feasible time? If its 10 seconds for example, there will be ...
Maestro's user avatar
  • 1,967
4 votes
2 answers
3k views

Which cryptocurrency has the smallest block time?

What is the lowest block time of any cryptocurrency? I don't mean the time of an individual block, but the target time per block. What is the shortest reasonable block interval?
MagikCow's user avatar
  • 217
3 votes
3 answers
238 views

What if the execution time for an alt coin script exceeds the block time?

I don't know when and how often a script is executed, but it seems to me that there would be a problem if a single script (or a sum of all scripts in a block) exceeds the time it takes to be included ...
makerofthings7's user avatar