No block confirmed for more than 1 hour 30 minutes!

[jackg]

According to blockchain.info, there was no block confired for 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Is this due to downtime of certain mining companies, or down to the bugginess of blockchain.info? If the next block is not found within 1 hour and 30 minutes then that would be useful to the network as the time for "generated bitcoin" to not run out will increase slightly by a few days!

[1714190946]

1714190946

[1714190946]

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[1714190946]

1714190946

[philipma1957]

According to blockchain.info, there was no block confired for 1 hour and 30 minutes.
Is this due to downtime of certain mining companies, or down to the bugginess of blockchain.info? If the next block is not found within 1 hour and 30 minutes then that would be useful to the network as the time for "generated bitcoin" to not run out will increase slightly by a few days!

it is called variance.  ie a longshot in a horse race does happen once in a while .


and you are correct if we rip 90 minute blocks  instead of 10 min blocks  it would make for better difficulty.  well lower difficulty

[Dahhi]

The difficulty might be lower, but 90 minutes block time will increase the length of time it takes for transactions to be confirmed. Don't you think?

[leowonderful]

The difficulty might be lower, but 90 minutes block time will increase the length of time it takes for transactions to be confirmed. Don't you think?

The chances of more blocks coming in normal or even faster succession is also possible, so it near evens out in the long run. Don't worry, transactions will go through. It can also mean lower difficulty like phil said, but I doubt it as Bitmain's cranking out those new S9's and any drops will just be people replacing miners and be minor.

Tl;dr it happens with bitcoin and if you want to use Bitcoin, you'll deal with this. Doesn't turn many people away from the currency, but an hour or two of no payments can get frustrating.

[topiOleg]

The difficulty might be lower, but 90 minutes block time will increase the length of time it takes for transactions to be confirmed. Don't you think?

When you use Bitcoin often, you know sometimes next block taking longer to be found like over half of a hour. In the end Bitcoin is not about super fast confirmed transactions, but rather very trustable ledger. 90 minutes block can create some congestion and those with lower fees might wait over two hours for their first confirmation, but it returns back to normal after few hours. Dont know what is longest time between blocks so far, but 90 minutes should not so far from the record.

[jackg]

The difficulty might be lower, but 90 minutes block time will increase the length of time it takes for transactions to be confirmed. Don't you think?

When you use Bitcoin often, you know sometimes next block taking longer to be found like over half of a hour. In the end Bitcoin is not about super fast confirmed transactions, but rather very trustable ledger. 90 minutes block can create some congestion and those with lower fees might wait over two hours for their first confirmation, but it returns back to normal after few hours. Dont know what is longest time between blocks so far, but 90 minutes should not so far from the record.

Yes, 90 minutes is probably onr of the longest waits since bitcoin has been released to the public.
This "problem" was summarised bybthe first two replies to say that it's the block chain evening itself out (though miners would have lost some profits from it no doubt). So it is quite good that this latency is added in order to bring the block chain back on track (with the generated Bitcoins from miners).

[leowonderful]

The difficulty might be lower, but 90 minutes block time will increase the length of time it takes for transactions to be confirmed. Don't you think?

When you use Bitcoin often, you know sometimes next block taking longer to be found like over half of a hour. In the end Bitcoin is not about super fast confirmed transactions, but rather very trustable ledger. 90 minutes block can create some congestion and those with lower fees might wait over two hours for their first confirmation, but it returns back to normal after few hours. Dont know what is longest time between blocks so far, but 90 minutes should not so far from the record.

Yes, 90 minutes is probably onr of the longest waits since bitcoin has been released to the public.
This "problem" was summarised bybthe first two replies to say that it's the block chain evening itself out (though miners would have lost some profits from it no doubt). So it is quite good that this latency is added in order to bring the block chain back on track (with the generated Bitcoins from miners).

I've had to wait 100 mins last week or so. This shit happens more than you think it does, and it always seems to happen right when I'm making a purchase... xD there's been a gap of 1 or 2 days earlier in Bitcoin's history when Satoshi was still messing with it, so this isn't anything. You can look it up on google, there's plenty of info about it and it's actually pretty interesting imo.

[mocacinno]

Here's a nice graph on this topic:

http://hashingit.com/analysis/41-waiting-for-blocks

It also explains quite a bit about the probability of this phenomenon.

In fact, if you look at the graph you do see that 5400 seconds between two blocks can indeed be considered pretty rare

[Das]

Bitcoin developers need to deploy lightning network. If things go according to plan and bitcoin goes mainstream, the congestion will multiply and people might start looking at some altcoin to replace bitcoin.

[jackg]

Bitcoin developers need to deploy lightning network. If things go according to plan and bitcoin goes mainstream, the congestion will multiply and people might start looking at some altcoin to replace bitcoin.

That'll never happen.
What about the block rewards? How frequent is a new block released.
Maybe a network with a new block every 60 seconds and an income to miners of 1.25BTC may be quite good. However, then there's more problems (such as: how is the hard fork done on the network, It's decentralised and cannot really be controlled by one device, every bitcoin core has to be edited in order or this to happen and that's easier said than done).

[NorrisK]

Bitcoin developers need to deploy lightning network. If things go according to plan and bitcoin goes mainstream, the congestion will multiply and people might start looking at some altcoin to replace bitcoin.

That'll never happen.
What about the block rewards? How frequent is a new block released.
Maybe a network with a new block every 60 seconds and an income to miners of 1.25BTC may be quite good. However, then there's more problems (such as: how is the hard fork done on the network, It's decentralised and cannot really be controlled by one device, every bitcoin core has to be edited in order or this to happen and that's easier said than done).

Faster blocks also increase the risk of forking the network. The only thing that needs to be changed somehow imo is to allow more transactions to go through at lower fees. The fees have grown quite fast the last year and the blocks are almost all full nowadays.

Hardforking the network is not very likely after ethereum/ethereum classic drama. It will only get people to want to have both coins and both coins tradable and there will always be some exchanges that will offer the original chain coins.

[jackg]

Bitcoin developers need to deploy lightning network. If things go according to plan and bitcoin goes mainstream, the congestion will multiply and people might start looking at some altcoin to replace bitcoin.

That'll never happen.
What about the block rewards? How frequent is a new block released.
Maybe a network with a new block every 60 seconds and an income to miners of 1.25BTC may be quite good. However, then there's more problems (such as: how is the hard fork done on the network, It's decentralised and cannot really be controlled by one device, every bitcoin core has to be edited in order or this to happen and that's easier said than done).

Faster blocks also increase the risk of forking the network. The only thing that needs to be changed somehow imo is to allow more transactions to go through at lower fees. The fees have grown quite fast the last year and the blocks are almost all full nowadays.

Hardforking the network is not very likely after ethereum/ethereum classic drama. It will only get people to want to have both coins and both coins tradable and there will always be some exchanges that will offer the original chain coins.

Exactly. It's not a good idea to do a hard fork as it also reduces stability.
Based on the maintenance fee idea. I understand that the transaction with the greatest BTC/KB gets priority in the block. The only way to do this is by getting the majority of the community to reduce the fee so then it is much cheaper to send bitcoins.

[NorrisK]

Bitcoin developers need to deploy lightning network. If things go according to plan and bitcoin goes mainstream, the congestion will multiply and people might start looking at some altcoin to replace bitcoin.

That'll never happen.
What about the block rewards? How frequent is a new block released.
Maybe a network with a new block every 60 seconds and an income to miners of 1.25BTC may be quite good. However, then there's more problems (such as: how is the hard fork done on the network, It's decentralised and cannot really be controlled by one device, every bitcoin core has to be edited in order or this to happen and that's easier said than done).

Faster blocks also increase the risk of forking the network. The only thing that needs to be changed somehow imo is to allow more transactions to go through at lower fees. The fees have grown quite fast the last year and the blocks are almost all full nowadays.

Hardforking the network is not very likely after ethereum/ethereum classic drama. It will only get people to want to have both coins and both coins tradable and there will always be some exchanges that will offer the original chain coins.

Exactly. It's not a good idea to do a hard fork as it also reduces stability.
Based on the maintenance fee idea. I understand that the transaction with the greatest BTC/KB gets priority in the block. The only way to do this is by getting the majority of the community to reduce the fee so then it is much cheaper to send bitcoins.

If I'm not mistaken, there are a few more parameters than just the fee/kB that is included to determine whether a transaction gets included in a block or not.

Coin age is one of those. I think it is possible to send the coins mined and not moved in the early days without a fee and still get high priority when sending them.

[philipma1957]

Bitcoin developers need to deploy lightning network. If things go according to plan and bitcoin goes mainstream, the congestion will multiply and people might start looking at some altcoin to replace bitcoin.

That'll never happen.
What about the block rewards? How frequent is a new block released.
Maybe a network with a new block every 60 seconds and an income to miners of 1.25BTC may be quite good. However, then there's more problems (such as: how is the hard fork done on the network, It's decentralised and cannot really be controlled by one device, every bitcoin core has to be edited in order or this to happen and that's easier said than done).

Faster blocks also increase the risk of forking the network. The only thing that needs to be changed somehow imo is to allow more transactions to go through at lower fees. The fees have grown quite fast the last year and the blocks are almost all full nowadays.

Hardforking the network is not very likely after ethereum/ethereum classic drama. It will only get people to want to have both coins and both coins tradable and there will always be some exchanges that will offer the original chain coins.

Exactly. It's not a good idea to do a hard fork as it also reduces stability.
Based on the maintenance fee idea. I understand that the transaction with the greatest BTC/KB gets priority in the block. The only way to do this is by getting the majority of the community to reduce the fee so then it is much cheaper to send bitcoins.

If I'm not mistaken, there are a few more parameters than just the fee/kB that is included to determine whether a transaction gets included in a block or not.

Coin age is one of those. I think it is possible to send the coins mined and not moved in the early days without a fee and still get high priority when sending them.

A big move of btc say 1000 btc gets pushed up the list vs a move of .1 btc.

this would be in the case of size in kb and fee being equal  the 1000btc move gets the nod.

[jackg]

Bitcoin developers need to deploy lightning network. If things go according to plan and bitcoin goes mainstream, the congestion will multiply and people might start looking at some altcoin to replace bitcoin.

That'll never happen.
What about the block rewards? How frequent is a new block released.
Maybe a network with a new block every 60 seconds and an income to miners of 1.25BTC may be quite good. However, then there's more problems (such as: how is the hard fork done on the network, It's decentralised and cannot really be controlled by one device, every bitcoin core has to be edited in order or this to happen and that's easier said than done).

Faster blocks also increase the risk of forking the network. The only thing that needs to be changed somehow imo is to allow more transactions to go through at lower fees. The fees have grown quite fast the last year and the blocks are almost all full nowadays.

Hardforking the network is not very likely after ethereum/ethereum classic drama. It will only get people to want to have both coins and both coins tradable and there will always be some exchanges that will offer the original chain coins.

Exactly. It's not a good idea to do a hard fork as it also reduces stability.
Based on the maintenance fee idea. I understand that the transaction with the greatest BTC/KB gets priority in the block. The only way to do this is by getting the majority of the community to reduce the fee so then it is much cheaper to send bitcoins.

If I'm not mistaken, there are a few more parameters than just the fee/kB that is included to determine whether a transaction gets included in a block or not.

Coin age is one of those. I think it is possible to send the coins mined and not moved in the early days without a fee and still get high priority when sending them.

A big move of btc say 1000 btc gets pushed up the list vs a move of .1 btc.

this would be in the case of size in kb and fee being equal  the 1000btc move gets the nod.

Doesn't that transaction get pushed up as the fee is greater as some more amount of data would have to be stored to transfer 1000BTC compared to 0.1BTC (It'd only be a few bytes bigger but it would have a greater fee). This probably is also used to stop people clogging the network with small transactions when they can send one large one instead.
Also, based on the previous subject, if the network releases the blocks in a lower amount of time then the community would have to edit everything (Including, site scripts and APIs).

[mwizard]

If I'm not mistaken, there are a few more parameters than just the fee/kB that is included to determine whether a transaction gets included in a block or not.

Coin age is one of those. I think it is possible to send the coins mined and not moved in the early days without a fee and still get high priority when sending them.

As far as I know coin age is no longer relevant.  It is just fee divided by transaction size.

Of course it is ultimately up to the miner which transactions are selected.

[philipma1957]

Bitcoin developers need to deploy lightning network. If things go according to plan and bitcoin goes mainstream, the congestion will multiply and people might start looking at some altcoin to replace bitcoin.

That'll never happen.
What about the block rewards? How frequent is a new block released.
Maybe a network with a new block every 60 seconds and an income to miners of 1.25BTC may be quite good. However, then there's more problems (such as: how is the hard fork done on the network, It's decentralised and cannot really be controlled by one device, every bitcoin core has to be edited in order or this to happen and that's easier said than done).

Faster blocks also increase the risk of forking the network. The only thing that needs to be changed somehow imo is to allow more transactions to go through at lower fees. The fees have grown quite fast the last year and the blocks are almost all full nowadays.

Hardforking the network is not very likely after ethereum/ethereum classic drama. It will only get people to want to have both coins and both coins tradable and there will always be some exchanges that will offer the original chain coins.

Exactly. It's not a good idea to do a hard fork as it also reduces stability.
Based on the maintenance fee idea. I understand that the transaction with the greatest BTC/KB gets priority in the block. The only way to do this is by getting the majority of the community to reduce the fee so then it is much cheaper to send bitcoins.

If I'm not mistaken, there are a few more parameters than just the fee/kB that is included to determine whether a transaction gets included in a block or not.

Coin age is one of those. I think it is possible to send the coins mined and not moved in the early days without a fee and still get high priority when sending them.

A big move of btc say 1000 btc gets pushed up the list vs a move of .1 btc.

this would be in the case of size in kb and fee being equal  the 1000btc move gets the nod.

Doesn't that transaction get pushed up as the fee is greater as some more amount of data would have to be stored to transfer 1000BTC compared to 0.1BTC (It'd only be a few bytes bigger but it would have a greater fee). This probably is also used to stop people clogging the network with small transactions when they can send one large one instead.
Also, based on the previous subject, if the network releases the blocks in a lower amount of time then the community would have to edit everything (Including, site scripts and APIs).

no the data size for 1000 btc can be as low as 227kb  the data size for .1 btc can be as low as 227kb.

If I had 1000 btc  from solo mining when blocks were 50 btc it would be 20 blocks into my account. Forget fees just made it 50btc  per block for easy math.  This would be 20 x 227kb = 4540kb on move  from address A to Address B  since it was 20 transactions to get the 1000 btc.

When I move from Address B to Address C it wold be 227kb  physical size.
I could do a fee of .0001 

in the case of the 0.1 btc  Lets say I was mining on a pool and I ran 0.01 per block so 100  transactions at  227kb = 22700kb

moving from address D to address E   when I move from address  E to Address F  THE SIZE IS 1 TRANSACTION OF 227KB.

SO  if I pay 0.0001 for this move of 0.1 btc  size of 227kb

VS  0.0001 for the first move of 1,000 btc size of 227kb

the network will put the 1000 btc ahead of the 0.1 btc  in priority.

as for the smallest transaction in kb it is 227kb.

  I have moved 36btc in a 227kb transaction on a group buy of Avalon 6's

[jackg]

~snip

Doesn't that transaction get pushed up as the fee is greater as some more amount of data would have to be stored to transfer 1000BTC compared to 0.1BTC (It'd only be a few bytes bigger but it would have a greater fee). This probably is also used to stop people clogging the network with small transactions when they can send one large one instead.
Also, based on the previous subject, if the network releases the blocks in a lower amount of time then the community would have to edit everything (Including, site scripts and APIs).

no the data size for 1000 btc can be as low as 227kb  the data size for .1 btc can be as low as 227kb.

If I had 1000 btc  from solo mining when blocks were 50 btc it would be 20 blocks into my account. Forget fees just made it 50btc  per block for easy math.  This would be 20 x 227kb = 4540kb on move  from address A to Address B  since it was 20 transactions to get the 1000 btc.

When I move from Address B to Address C it wold be 227kb  physical size.
I could do a fee of .0001 

in the case of the 0.1 btc  Lets say I was mining on a pool and I ran 0.01 per block so 100  transactions at  227kb = 22700kb

moving from address D to address E   when I move from address  E to Address F  THE SIZE IS 1 TRANSACTION OF 227KB.

SO  if I pay 0.0001 for this move of 0.1 btc  size of 227kb

VS  0.0001 for the first move of 1,000 btc size of 227kb

the network will put the 1000 btc ahead of the 0.1 btc  in priority.

as for the smallest transaction in kb it is 227kb.

I have moved 36btc in a 227kb transaction on a group buy of Avalon 6's

Is the transaction size often 227kb or is that just the minimum it can be?
This therefore means that the network just favours the process larger amounts of BTC than smaller amounts fo BTC. PRobably to increase the volume of BTC sent accross the network per day possibly. Or it could just be a way to easilly organise the transactions when the fee is the sime.

Also, does the messages you add to transactions also increase the transaction size so a greater fee is needed to convey a message about a transaction?

[mwizard]

A big move of btc say 1000 btc gets pushed up the list vs a move of .1 btc.

this would be in the case of size in kb and fee being equal  the 1000btc move gets the nod.

I believe the transaction output values are always stored as 8 bytes, technically as a signed number of satoshi (int64-t).

So the transaction value makes no difference to the transaction length or priority.  Miners don't care if the transaction is for 1000 Bitcoins or 0.001 Bitcoins.  All that matters is the fee and transaction physical size.  

Also a minor point for some later posters.  When talking about transaction length please just say the transaction length is 227 bytes rather than 227kb.  kb normally means kilobits (or sometimes kilobyte) making the transaction 227,000 bits (or sometimes 227,000 bytes) in length.  

[alh]

While the discussion of what transactions get included next is quite interesting, it really isn't quite on point for the thread. If I had 1000BTC that I wanted to send, and it took well over an hour, I would be quite annoyed. It also gives lie to the common perception:

Bitcoin moves money quite fast (sometimes)