Mining Difficulty Question

[Novalok]

I'm not a miner but i do have a question.

I see difficulty going up Quite a bit which is expected.
But currently on the blockchain we have had 7 blocks a hour. At times less. Which is around 1 block every 10 minutes. If mining Power doesn't rise to the point of Mining Blocks Much quicker will the difficulty stop rising so fast or how does that work. Its hard to think miners would keep going if the difficulty got to the point that we had 7 blocks in 2 hours  or more.

Also how does this adversely impact bitcoin as a whole seeing as my last 2 transactions took 30 minutes to over an hour to get just 3 confirmations. Doesn't having confirmations that slow hurt us?

[odolvlobo]

The purpose of the difficulty is to adjust mining such that a block is produced every 10 minutes on average. The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks, which is ideally every 2 weeks. If the blocks were produced too quickly over the last period, then the difficulty is raised so that the succeeding blocks are produced more slowly (assuming that the total hash rate remains the same). If the blocks were produced too slowly over the last period, then the difficulty is lowered.

Currently, the difficulty is going up by very large amounts every 2016 blocks because the ASIC miners that are coming online are raising the total hash rate to incredible levels, but there have been times in the past where the difficulty has dropped.

[panck4beer]

Also how does this adversely impact bitcoin as a whole seeing as my last 2 transactions took 30 minutes to over an hour to get just 3 confirmations. Doesn't having confirmations that slow hurt us?

With bitcoin hashing power, 2 confirmations are enought. More are fine, but dont add much anymore at all - these transactions are already safely included in blockchain.

[Puppet]

Also how does this adversely impact bitcoin as a whole seeing as my last 2 transactions took 30 minutes to over an hour to get just 3 confirmations. Doesn't having confirmations that slow hurt us?

Its called variance and you will always have that, whether the network is growing, shrinking or stable. IF anything,  because of its exponential growith in the past 6 months confirmations have on average been way faster than they were last year and way faster than they likely will be by the end of next year. That doesnt mean you wont sometimes see several hours for 6 blocks, thats just the nature of probability which underpins mining.

[waltermot321]

I'm not a miner but i do have a question.

I see difficulty going up Quite a bit which is expected.
But currently on the blockchain we have had 7 blocks a hour. At times less. Which is around 1 block every 10 minutes. If mining Power doesn't rise to the point of Mining Blocks Much quicker will the difficulty stop rising so fast or how does that work. Its hard to think miners would keep going if the difficulty got to the point that we had 7 blocks in 2 hours  or more.

Also how does this adversely impact bitcoin as a whole seeing as my last 2 transactions took 30 minutes to over an hour to get just 3 confirmations. Doesn't having confirmations that slow hurt us?

Sometimes, luck play important role too. And for confirmations, even if the difficulty increase it will also take about 10 minute per confirmations, because the difficulty would just change accordingly..