Fragmentation of the Bitcoin network

[Come-from-Beyond]

Looks like new ASICs are added too quickly:







Such a picture can be seen more and more often now, it's not just 7 "lucky" blocks in a row. Now a gap between blocks is ~8 mins, in the future it will be less and less. At some point we can face a 1 min gap, this will lead to a very high orphaned blocks rate and the Bitcoin network will become fragmented*.

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* - "fragmented" means that clients will be spending a lot of resources to resolve race conditions.

[Birdy]

Such a picture can be seen more and more often now, it's not just 7 "lucky" blocks in a row. Now a gap between blocks is ~8 mins, in the future it will be less and less. At some point we can face a 1 min gap, this will lead to a very high orphaned blocks rate and the Bitcoin network will become fragmented*.

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* - "fragmented" means that clients will be spending a lot of resources to resolve race conditions.

Nah...the increase is already extremely high. It needs a lot of new miners or upgrades being added every week just to keep it at this level.
But I do think the growth will continue at this level for a while.

[DeathAndTaxes]

It will only be less and less if the rate of increase (not the increase) goes up.  To get to 1 minute would require the hashrate to rise by a factor of 10 in one difficulty period.  It would then quickly reset within a few days unless the difficulty again increased by a factor of 10 continually.