Bitcoin Forum

I understand the need for the difficulty to increase to keep the target amount of bitcoins being mined up to a set level but is waiting 4 hours to generate a block and get confirmations going to start hurting the economy?  The present round is taking forever and transactions that took 30 minutes two weeks ago now could reach the 8hr mark to be confirmed.

Hope this is a temporary situation.

Bitcoinmonitor (http://www.bitcoinmonitor.com/) is showing at least four blocks in the past hour. Bitcoincharts (http://bitcoincharts.com/) is showing an average of 7.2 blocks per hour.

I assume from your comment about "the present round" that you're looking at one mining pool in isolation, and not the entire network?

Looks like that may be the case.  I am pretty good at the mining side but the economy past transactions moving from the pool I am still new at.  My bitcoin client with my wallet has been showing 0/unconfirmed for 30 minutes now (not the pool payout) where I used to have 5 confirmations before an hour was up.  I was under the impression that once the network sees the transaction it takes solved blocks to create the confirmations.

Guess I will just watch and see.

Could just be luck - except for one block a few minutes ago the rest were all over 30 minutes ago. Do you have 1 confirmation now?

Thanks for the link to bitcoin montor - looks like I requested the transaction right after the last block was generated (still 0/unconfirmed).  I guess I have just been spoiled by the speed of the last few weeks.

Often tx are not getting put in quickly if no fee is attached. Even at the new difficulty we have faster blocks that we 'should'.

I always attach a fee to my transactions. It helps to be a good citizen if you want to see something grow.  As for my issue - my local bitcoin wallet jumped 4 confirmations in a 3 minute period a few minutes after my last post.  I wonder if it was just local blockchain update lag.  Thank for all the input.