Just out of curiosity, does anyone happen to know the shortest and longest periods between blocks thus far?
Better yet, where can we found tabular data of blocks and their vital data (e.g., timestamp and difficulty) from which this can easily be deduced? The closest to this I found was blockexplorer nethash, but the minimum allowed is steps of 5 blocks.
"Shortest interval" would be somewhat undefined since published timestamps don't have to be synchronized, you can have negative intervals.
As for longest, if 254508 blocks are distributed exponentially with mean 10 minutes, you'd expect the max to be 130 minutes.
Just out of curiosity, does anyone happen to know the shortest and longest periods between blocks thus far?
There was a thread long ago about longest time between blocks. If I remember it was like 9 hours.
That's virtually impossible unless there was something very wrong with the network. If it's distributed as usual the chance of that is one in a trillion trillions.