Bitcoin Forum

i thought that each confirmation was a new block, obviously i was wrong.  how can i have 5 confirmations in 16 mins?  please explain?  there has been times ive waited an hour for 1?

many thanks

No, you thought correctly.  A confirmation means that another block was added to the chain.  It is all about how long it takes for blocks to be added.  Sometimes it's seconds.  Others it's over an hour.

A run of fast blocks.  Some people had very good luck.

Difficulty is adjusted every 2,016 blocks to attempt to solve a block every 10 minutes.  There is now way to make sure it takes 10 minutes.  So it's the average that is striven for.

Just a string of luck for those picking up blocks.  It's like the number of customers walking into a store.  During a few minutes it may be dead and 10 minutes later people may be pouring in.

Some pools had some major luck probably which explains why you got so many confirmations in 16 minutes.

Yep ! Bitminter is getting a lot lucky these days  ;D

The 10 minutes between blocks its an average. Yesterday some blocks took more than 30 minutes to solve and having 5 confirmations took a lot of time.

Wow, you're one lucky guy. I just recieved a transaction, and I had to wait two whole hours to get the confirmations.


What you thought was correct. The miners were probably very lucky, and guessed the nonce combination on average every 3 minutes. That's surprisingly fast, considering the current difficulty. May I ask, could you give us the TX hash, so we can see what pools mined those blocks?

This is more or less a normal situation because just a few days ago three confirmations took a total of about an hour which I was very surprised.

Bitcoin total hashrate is significantly increasing due to a variety of factors. Until the next difficulty, we are likely to see a slightly shorter block time. However, OP is experiencing a varience as blocks are never consistent and the intervals can be very short or very long.