Bitcoin Forum

I was under the belief and I'm probably wrong, but I thought BTC blocks were supposed to be solved every 10 minutes??

I've noticed that depositing or withdrawing BTC from any exchange, small or large can take upwards to an hour at times. Is this because there's not enough mining hardware online to handle the workload or the difficulty is set too high??

Just curious....

Bad Luck for block solving has nothing to do with transactions.

so if there were no miners, transactions would still happen? I thought a block consisted of a number of transactions that had been verified? At least that's what I got off watching several videos about it on YouTube..

No, you would need at least one miner for transactions to be included into a block. And the "10 minutes" is just the overall average. (Sometimes blocks take only 20 seconds and another time there is 2h without a block.  It is completely random and you can not predict when the next block will appear.)

Hashrate(?):   33,455,935 GH/s
Block Generation Time(?):   
1 block: 9.3 minutes
3 blocks: 27.9 minutes
6 blocks: 55.9 minutes


Current average.  Blocks do not take hours to solve anymore....there's too much power being thrown.

I may be mistaken but it sounds as if your problem is transaction confirmation time, not block solve time.

As already mentioned blocks are solved about every 10 minutes on average.  This has always been the case irrespective of the number of miners.  The mining difficulty is automatically changed each fortnight to ensure 10 minutes stays around the average solve time.

Transaction confirmation time can be a very different matter.  It is up to a block miner to decide whether to include your transaction in the block they are mining.  

If you don't include a mining fee, and the Bitcoins in the transaction have only recently been moved. it can take a while for the transaction to be confirmed in a block.  Several hours are possible. The miners will normally include transaction which are 'high priority' or which include fees. For non fee transactions it just depends on the miner - in the long term it is in the miners interest to encourage fee paying.

If you need the transaction to go through quickly ensure you have included a mining fee.  I think the default mining fee is currently 0.0001 BTC.

See

http://bitcoinfees.com
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction_fees

 if you want the details.

There is a ~0.15 % chance that a block will take longer than one hour.

Proof: Taking the total hash rate you provided above and the probability to find a block with just one hash (https://blockchain.info/q/probability), gives a probability of approximately 0.18 % to find a block in one second.
https://i.imgur.com/3K7jjlp.png
https://i.imgur.com/pT38wqA.png

Consequently the probability to find a block in the n-th second is:
https://i.imgur.com/3eDl8Hc.gif

(Side-Note: Given the above formula, one can expect a block every 551 seconds:)
https://i.imgur.com/2gepSo0.gif

The said probability that a block will take longer than one hour (3600 seconds) is:
https://i.imgur.com/gjYfi0H.gif

One small item of note. The original "expectation" was that it would take 14 days (aka a fortnight) before 2016 blocks would be solved, and then difficulty would adjust. The difficulty adjust every 2016 blocks. If that is less than 14 days, difficulty goes up. This has been the case for months. If it were to take longer than 14 days to solve 2016 blocks, then difficulty would decrease. Difficulty decreases are RARE!

Maybe your transaction fees are not enough. Also, i observed that if too many blocks are solved in a small timeframe, the next blocks will be slower. (Correct me if im wrong)  :)

maybe if the difficulty wasn't 4 billion

The time it takes to solve a block has to do with luck, so it can go from few sec to hours.