Bitcoin Forum

http://imageshack.us/a/img69/2466/h3b0.png

6 blocks were found withing half an hour... just to wait more than a whole hour to find the 7th one.

hmm...how come?

That looks like what flux would do.

Another interesting screenshot:

http://s21.postimg.org/ywunlajav/blocks.png

:) Looks good.

This is actually one of the few annoyances I have with btc.  It always seems that when I choose to send some coins is the time when blocks won't be found for at least another 20 minutes.  Must just be my terrible luck.

Ur luck is not so terrible :). I recall 2 times when I had to wait an hour for a next block.

It would have been very easy to significantly reduce the variation in block times when bitcoin was designed.  All Satoshi had to do was require that multiple hashes were to be found by the miner per block.  eg:  if each miner had to find 50 hashes that met the difficulty target per block then the block periods would not have much variation.

I always find it gratifying to see all these armchair experts with their "very easy" "improvements" which would hose the security.

We actually need the variation in order to have a decisive consensus. Even ignoring the bandwidth and dos vulnerability that would arise from cumulative work proofs, and the consolidation risks from turning mining into a race... the problem with incremental work POW is that it's not much of a lottery, which means that you'd constantly be losing hash power to orphaning as miners find solutions at very close to the same time.

If this isn't obvious to you after it's pointed out, imagine if instead every miner found a block _exactly_ ten minutes after the last block: Exach miner would have their own chain, none longer than any others... the network split into a zillion separate universes.

actually I'm aware that you need a bit of variation so that the fastest miner doesn't dominate.  This is the payoff involved- you need to balance the fastest miner consistently winning versus variation.

Sure, and you can equally do that balance (making blocks happen below some time a greater portion of the time) just by lowering the time between blocks— without out the cumulative work advantage that creates an expected return increase for larger miners or increasing the proof size.

Imagine further that radioactive decay were no longer stochastic but set to a timer...  Thank god for dice! 

very interesting screenshots  :D

I love speculating about bitcoin's far future.

When the block subsidy is gone or insignificant it won't be profitable to mine immediately after a block is found as there will be no waiting fees.

As fees pile up hashing power comes back online, the average is still 10 minutes, but the variance is reduced. Though average times during busiest hours (in the bitcoiniest parts of the world?) will be lower.

ASICs kind of muck this up as they probably can't do anything else profitably (different chain maybe?) and it may be worse to power them on and off every few minutes I don't know.

6 blocks in a row...

http://s7.postimg.org/855w73i0r/50btc.png

50BTC is lucky, or has a lot of hash power?  :o

I don't think this is anything new. There is no guarantee of a 10 minute block time, just a good chance.

Yes but 3 blocks in 1 min is like: WTF?

I recall when I was playing SatoshiDice I got 10 winning 50% bets in a row...

Interesting coincidence:

http://s27.postimg.org/n5pdrecyr/777.png

How long we expect to wait for the next block to be found does not depend on how long we've already been waiting for it.