Title: Why was block 52,000 generated on April 2010 and not January 2010? Post by: Lorenzo on May 06, 2015, 06:51:32 AM According to Blockchain.info, block 52,000 was generated on April 19, 2010:
http://blockchain.info/block-height/52000 Satoshi launched Bitcoin in early January 2009 and that's when the Bitcoin network first came into existence. The genesis block contains the below message: Quote The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks. The Bitcoin network is designed to mine a block once every 10 minutes on average, or 144 blocks per day. ~52,000 blocks should be generated per year which means that block 52,000 should have been mined almost exactly 1 year after the Bitcoin network first came into existence. And yet, we see that block 52,000 was generated on April 2010 - a full 16 months after the genesis block. Why is this the case? I understand that the network hashrate can affect block generation times but if you look at the charts, the hashrate actually remained fairly constant throughout most of 2009 from an initial hashrate of about 0.005 GH/s to 0.007 GH/s by the year's end: http://blockchain.info/charts/hash-rate?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= Title: Re: Why was block 52,000 generated on April 2010 and not January 2010? Post by: gmaxwell on May 06, 2015, 07:17:08 AM The network difficulty can not go below below a minimum level (Described as "1" these days... I.e. "the minimum", all normal difficulty numbers are expressed as multiples of this minimum value), so due to lack of sufficient hashpower the network under-produced during its first year or so.
Title: Re: Why was block 52,000 generated on April 2010 and not January 2010? Post by: Lorenzo on May 06, 2015, 07:30:40 AM The network difficulty can not go below below a minimum level (Described as "1" these days... I.e. "the minimum", all normal difficulty numbers are expressed as multiples of this minimum value), so due to lack of sufficient hashpower the network under-produced during its first year or so. I see. I was actually going by Blockchain.info's charts which shows the difficulty stayed at 1 during all of 2009 and also reports that Satoshi mined pretty much consistently throughout the year using multiple machines. What was the reason for enforcing a minimum difficulty? If the network hashrate is too low and the previous blocks took too much time to generate at the prior difficulty, wouldn't it be better to change the protocol so that the difficulty is retargeted to a value under 1? Title: Re: Why was block 52,000 generated on April 2010 and not January 2010? Post by: jl2012 on May 06, 2015, 08:46:08 AM The network difficulty can not go below below a minimum level (Described as "1" these days... I.e. "the minimum", all normal difficulty numbers are expressed as multiples of this minimum value), so due to lack of sufficient hashpower the network under-produced during its first year or so. I see. I was actually going by Blockchain.info's charts which shows the difficulty stayed at 1 during all of 2009 and also reports that Satoshi mined pretty much consistently throughout the year using multiple machines. What was the reason for enforcing a minimum difficulty? If the network hashrate is too low and the previous blocks took too much time to generate at the prior difficulty, wouldn't it be better to change the protocol so that the difficulty is retargeted to a value under 1? The difficulty must not be too low or an attacker may rewrite the chain very easily. The slow period in 2009 also suggests that Satoshi did not try to maximize his bitcoin holding in the early day. He was mining only because he wanted to keep the system alive. There were only 4 blocks on 18/07/2009, while that should be 144 in the normal case Just 1 year later, on 13/07/2010, we had 692 blocks. And that cycle is the only one with 4x jump in difficulty |