Long Deep Tunnel

[Ascholten]

Im pretty new to this, so excuse my ignorance in advance.

I just seen a task take over 8 hours to complete.   Is it fairly common that it takes this long to find a bitcoin or did we just run into a bad luck spot?

Aaron

[Stephen Gornick]

Is it fairly common that it takes this long to find a bitcoin or did we just run into a bad luck spot?

Are you referring to a specific pool? 

Block generation is occurring as normal:

 - http://blockchain.info/blocks/1345240981413

[Ascholten]

Yes stephen,  It took over 8 hours of mining for the pool to finally find a bitcoin.  Normally at least for the past few days, it generally was a lot faster than that.  I was just wondering if that was just a particularly slow find or does it go that long between pools fairly often?

Thank you
Aaron

[tiberiandusk]

It depends on the size of the pool and random luck. Larger pools usually find blocks more often but even they can hit dry spells if the random number gods are frowning upon them.

[Paladin69]

Today was a terrible day at bitminter.   

[Turbor]

Today was a terrible day at bitminter.   

Why ?

[Ascholten]

Id assume probably because it's taking several hours per block found instead of just a few hours per.

Had one take over 8 hours yesterday.

Aaron

[rjk]

Id assume probably because it's taking several hours per block found instead of just a few hours per.

Had one take over 8 hours yesterday.

Aaron

It sounds like you think there is only one pool. There are actually many, which one are you specifically referring to? Deepbit, Slush, EMC, Ozcoin, MtRed, .....?

[gigantic]

Each pool is different, and dont forget the Luck factor 

[Ascholten]

I know there are different pools.   Some days are good and you can find a hit in under a minute, other days they can take many hours to hit one.

Then again, from what I see, the difficulty is going to be going up some, so it might get even harder.  Yes luck plays into it but when it's harder to begin with, luck can only do so much.

Aaron