66 minutes between blocks?

[Proofer]

Today is "El Salvador day," so there's lots of news and lots of trading.

According to blockchain.info, block 699509 was timestamped 17:00 UTC and 699510 was timestamped 18:06 UTC -- a 66-minute interval. Isn't that quite unusual? If so, what might have been the cause?

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[BlackHatCoiner]

It didn't happen for a hash to be found with the given conditions. I wouldn't say it's unusual; there's a 10 minutes interval on average between the blocks, but they may take much more than expected. They can also be found in much less time than expected. For example, block 699511 was found 3 minutes right after the previous one.

El Salvador doesn't have to do with this.

[Upgrade00]

The "10 minute" blocktime is the average interval between blocks which is managed by the mining difficulty, adjusted every two weeks (approximately) to keep the interval uniform.
It can be shorter than that or longer than that depending upon how fast the next cryptographic puzzle is solved.

[RXUser]

this is a usual situation that can happen depending on the miners/pools, the longest block time that ever happened is 5 days and 8 hours from the block 1
the 3 longest blocks time from this year are :
block 689301   02h19m
block 679786   02h02m
block 687143   01h59m

[PrivacyG]

It is why it is called an AVERAGE block time.  It would be impossible to set an exact time of 10 minutes per block because there is something miners have to solve and it may take more or less time depending on a few factors such as hashrate or difficulty.  If I gave you a math problem, it would be impossible in the same way to make you solve it in exactly 10 minutes.  The average time however is 10 min and you find out it is as soon as you start using Bitcoin often.

My transactions typically get one confirmation in at least 5 minutes and at most 15, but it is usually around 10 that it happens.  Should the hashrate increase or decrease substantially before the difficulty adjustment, block times change together with it.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

[Bitcoin_Arena]

If so, what might have been the cause?

Finding the next block is like a random game of chance or probability. In Simple terms, it's like if you are six players (miners) playing a die game and the first person to roll the dice to number 6 wins the game (Mine a new block)



You will find a situation where players will take so long to roll a number six after very many attempts, while at other times it will take any of them just seconds to roll a six.

[odolvlobo]

According to blockchain.info, block 699509 was timestamped 17:00 UTC and 699510 was timestamped 18:06 UTC -- a 66-minute interval.

Also, please note that the timestamp is not the actual time. Changing the timestamp is another way to vary the block hash. The timestamp must be later than the median of the last eleven blocks (roughly in the last hour) and not more than two hours greater than the actual time.

[o_e_l_e_o]

The chance of a block not being found within a specific time frame is given by the equation:

e^(-x/600)

Where x is equal to the number of seconds. If we make x = 3600 for 1 hour, then the chance of a block not being found in 1 hour works out to just under 0.25%. Given that, we would expect to see a 1 hour or more block time every 400 blocks on average, or little bit more frequently than once every 3 days.

This of course assumes that the difficulty and hashrate are constant. If the hashrate has fallen since the last difficulty readjustment, then the chances of longer block times increases.

[uneps]

It is why it is called an AVERAGE block time.  It would be impossible to set an exact time of 10 minutes per block because there is something miners have to solve and it may take more or less time depending on a few factors such as hashrate or difficulty.  If I gave you a math problem, it would be impossible in the same way to make you solve it in exactly 10 minutes.  The average time however is 10 min and you find out it is as soon as you start using Bitcoin often.

My transactions typically get one confirmation in at least 5 minutes and at most 15, but it is usually around 10 that it happens.  Should the hashrate increase or decrease substantially before the difficulty adjustment, block times change together with it.

-
Regards,
PrivacyG

That's right, we can't really determine the time very accurately. We can only measure average time. We can't confirm the time with a 10 minute block.  It depends on the speed of the transaction. Sometimes it can be more sometimes it can be less.

[nutildah]

The relative unpredictably of block times is one of its greatest weaknesses as a currency, in my experience. Not receiving a confirmation within ~20 minutes or so can be embarrassing for an in-person payment, and a 30+ wait can actually be costly -- for one party or both.

As far as emulating money is concerned, I think Litecoin is far more practical for payments and use it whenever I can. I used to like to place live bets on sports -- Dogecoin was ideal for that.

[Lucius]

The relative unpredictably of block times is one of its greatest weaknesses as a currency, in my experience. Not receiving a confirmation within ~20 minutes or so can be embarrassing for an in-person payment, and a 30+ wait can actually be costly -- for one party or both.

Unfortunately, this is completely true, and anyone who has been in that situation has certainly not felt comfortable - especially if they wanted to show someone how easy it is to use Bitcoin to pay, and then the transaction is not confirmed for more than 20+ minutes. I recently had such a situation, not only was the time between blocks more than 45 minutes, but for some reason, the seller asked for more than 2 confirmations which extended the whole thing to 1 hour.

On-chain payments will simply never be able to work in direct payments - so for now the only choice is LN.

[o_e_l_e_o]

Not receiving a confirmation within ~20 minutes or so can be embarrassing for an in-person payment, and a 30+ wait can actually be costly -- for one party or both.

I still think that we all think about this wrong.

We are waiting for confirmations to ensure a transaction is irreversible, right? The only payment method which is instantly irreversible is cash. The most common - credit cards - can be reversed for between 90 and 180 days after the payment is made. Similar with debit cards, checks, PayPal, bank transfers, etc. All the payee has to do is phone their bank or payment provider and dispute the payment, claim they were hacked/scammed/phished/whatever, claim the goods or services were not provided as promised, or a dozen other reasons, and they payment can be reversed.

A credit card transaction you see instantly, the money is available for the merchant to spend in 3 to 5 working days, and can be reversed for up to 180 days.
A bitcoin transaction you see instantly, the money is available for the merchant to spend instantly, and can be reversed (with much more difficulty) for up to an hour, maybe.

Now, obviously if you are transacting significant amounts of money then I would never dream of accepting zero confirmations, but if you are making a small payment (cup of coffee, fast food, etc.), then I think it is entirely reasonable for the merchant to accept a zero confirmation transaction, provided it pays a reasonable fee, is not flagged as RBF, and has no unconfirmed parents.

As a result, the vast majority of the security for unconfirmed transactions comes not from within the Bitcoin system, but from external factors such as the large numbers of honest Bitcoin users who would never attempt to defraud their vendors, the tolerance among vendors for small amounts of fraud, the ability (or threat) of vendors resorting to the legal system or other types of recourse, and other factors which have nothing to do with the design of the Bitcoin protocol.

All of these things hold equally true for opt-in RBF (and they’re not unlike the situation with credit card payments in the US, which are easily reversable for months after the exchange and yet which have fraud rates low enough that almost all significant merchants accept them).

[nutildah]

A bitcoin transaction you see instantly, the money is available for the merchant to spend instantly, and can be reversed (with much more difficulty) for up to an hour, maybe.

The stigma against unconfirmed transaction has decreased dramatically over the years. The minimum number of confirmations required by most exchanges has dropped from 6 to 3 to now 1 in some places. The problem isn't with me so much as the people who won't give me what I want w/o somewhere between 1-6 confirmations.

But also, when you're trying to demonstrate to somebody the miracle of bitcoin and you're both sitting there waiting for the confirmation to roll in as the final part of your presentation and 15 then 20 minutes go by and you're like what the fuck. Try explaining everything you just told me to somebody who doesn't know much about bitcoin but wants peace of mind that its impossible for me to stop the payment.

Ideally LN will someday be used to cover such transactions, but its still not the easiest idea to get onboard for most people.

[stompix]

A credit card transaction you see instantly, the money is available for the merchant to spend in 3 to 5 working days, and can be reversed for up to 180 days. A bitcoin transaction you see instantly, the money is available for the merchant to spend instantly, and can be reversed (with much more difficulty) for up to an hour, maybe.

And which customer do you think gives a fuck for how long afterward is the money still inaccessible for the merchant?
The customer doesn't care, he swipes his card, sees the message grabs his products and he's out of the door, that's what counts for him, if you would be required after a card payment to wait 5 days in the shop before being allowed to take leave then nobody would use, even if the time would be 10 minutes, most would simply drop card payments and go back to cash.

All the payee has to do is phone their bank or payment provider and dispute the payment, claim they were hacked/scammed/phished/whatever, claim the goods or services were not provided as promised, or a dozen other reasons, and they payment can be reversed.

Yeah, I bet a lot of people who bought mining gear via bitcoin would love to have that option, tough luck, transactions can be reversed, scammers got away with all the money. Of course, for a merchant, it's a dream to keep the money no matter what but for a client that has been cheated, received a fake product, didn't get anything, that doesn't sound too good, isn't it?

There is no perfect system, each has flaws, but I really don't see any reason to stick to the 10 minutes rule, hundred of coins are working flawlessly with shorter intervals.

[o_e_l_e_o]

And which customer do you think gives a fuck for how long afterward is the money still inaccessible for the merchant?

None, and that's the point. None of this matters to the customer - it's entirely up to the merchant if they want to accept zero confirmation transactions or not. But from the point of view of actually being able to spend the money and knowing that the money isn't going to be unilaterally removed from their account without their consent, bitcoin wins hands down.

There is no perfect system, each has flaws, but I really don't see any reason to stick to the 10 minutes rule, hundred of coins are working flawlessly with shorter intervals.

I don't see the reason to change it. If you drop it to 5 minutes or even 1 minute, then it is still too slow to get confirmations for immediate sales likes coffee or fast food, and there is still the risk of a block interval of >10 minutes. If you want immediate confirmations, then no block time will ever be short enough, so just use Lightning. If you want complete finality, then you will still be waiting the same amount since it would take 60 confirmations with a 1 minute interval to reach the same finality as 6 confirmations with a 10 minute interval.

[stompix]

I don't see the reason to change it. If you drop it to 5 minutes or even 1 minute, then it is still too slow to get confirmations for immediate sales likes coffee or fast food, and there is still the risk of a block interval of >10 minutes. If you want immediate confirmations, then no block time will ever be short enough, so just use Lightning.

What if I don't want s* like this to happen?  

CoinPayments.net <noreply@coinpayments.net>
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA512
Hello,
Your payment of x BTC to x has timed out without us receiving the required funds. The transaction with ID x has been cancelled.
If you need any help or assistance feel free to contact us at https://www.coinpayments.net/help-support
CoinPayments.net

You send a payment and for one hour and a half no blocks are mined, mempool floods and surprise, when I come back I see this.
It's not just coffee or food, maybe you want to send someone some coins, maybe you want to fund your exchange account and you have to stay glued to your screen waiting for blocks no matter what fees you choose. Oh, use LN. What if you don't have enough funds in LN? You need...to...wait for the next block! Admit it's funny!

Common, let's be honest, there is NO way to have something slower when it could be done faster! I'm not even demanding the same blocks space to not enter a new debate about hardware requirement, cut the time in ten, and the space by the same. There is no reason not to do so!
Oh, and since I'm in the complaining mode, two weeks difficulty adjustment?

God was merciful that Bitcoin wasn't invented in 2001 or we would have 10kb blocks every 3600 seconds.

[o_e_l_e_o]

You send a payment and for one hour and a half no blocks are mined, mempool floods and surprise, when I come back I see this.

Cutting the block time doesn't solve this, though. Even with block times of one minute it is easily possible to underestimate a fee, the mempool to fill up, and your transaction to be delayed. The solution to this is enabling RBF so you can bump your fee, not shorter block times.

I'm not even demanding the same blocks space to not enter a new debate about hardware requirement, cut the time in ten, and the space by the same. There is no reason not to do so!

The reason not to do so is the big increase in stale blocks you would get with a one minute block time, which would result in more potential double spends and therefore mean you would be waiting for more than a couple of confirmations anyway. Not to mention all the increase in wasted work.

[Artemis3]

Or just wait and plan ahead. 1 sat/B should be the default and bumping that up should only be done in emergencies.

If you let the wallets decide, then when an exchange moves some funds from cold to hot or back or a market action triggers a bunch of trading bots, fees rise and the wallets start rising fees in response causing a cascade effect that takes quite a while to cool down. As i have mentioned before, its not a Bitcoin issue, but a wallet issue, but people blame Bitcoin.

In the old days the default tx/fee was fixed, now there is a guessing game prone to manipulation which artificially inflates the fees. You can opt out by going manual again in some (good) wallets, but all the garbage custodial wallets many casual users use (from exchanges, etc) won't let you decide anything. And some people go off-chain instead (ie. altcoins) which is even worse.

Only because a wallet won't let you pick the fee, as it was originally conceived...

RBF should be available in many wallets now and is something extra you could have for emergencies as well.

[stompix]

Cutting the block time doesn't solve this, though. Even with block times of one minute it is easily possible to underestimate a fee, the mempool to fill up, and your transaction to be delayed. The solution to this is enabling RBF so you can bump your fee, not shorter block times.

I can pay 1BTC/vbyte, if no block is mined that doesn't solve anything.
Common, I understand you want to defend the decade-long stone age setting but you're grasping at straws here, putting only the things that won't be solved first and not the ones that would be.

The reason not to do so is the big increase in stale blocks you would get with a one minute block time, which would result in more potential double spends and therefore mean you would be waiting for more than a couple of confirmations anyway. Not to mention all the increase in wasted work.

How many times did that prove to be a problem with Ethereum?
Now, If I would apply the same negativism as you, it will mean that to be safer we would need at least 1 hour blocks as even 10 minutes block time didn't prevent orphaned blocks.
Satoshi never said a word about segwit or asics or fibre but at the same, he offered no reason for the 10 minute time, so why would some things be allowed to deviate and others not? We already messed with the propagation time because of segwit, whatever math was used for the previous value can't be applied anymore, so why stick to it?

[Silberman]

Today is "El Salvador day," so there's lots of news and lots of trading.

According to blockchain.info, block 699509 was timestamped 17:00 UTC and 699510 was timestamped 18:06 UTC -- a 66-minute interval. Isn't that quite unusual? If so, what might have been the cause?

It is not unusual, on average a block should be found in 10 minutes, however that is the average, there are instances in which several blocks are going to be found in a span of a few minutes while sometime a block needs more than an hour to be mined, this is not rare and it should not be a sign of worry as this is how the network is designed to operate, I know this can be troublesome if you want a fast confirmation but it is what it is.