Six blocks in 11 minutes! Bitcoin on steroids?

[Bit_Happy]

The oldest block said only "11 minutes" and by the time I decided to grab the data it was 12 minutes:

305068   2 minutes   21   33.05 BTC   Discus Fish   12.18164062
305067   2 minutes   22   186.91 BTC   GHash.IO   8.73144531
305066   3 minutes   146   660.13 BTC   GHash.IO   84.96386719
305065   7 minutes   67   1,599.99 BTC   GHash.IO   124.86132812
305064   8 minutes   181   2,296.68 BTC   23.253.207.62   168.10058594
305063   12 minutes   154   3,689.36 BTC   GHash.IO   324.90136719

My last transaction confirmed so fast it was amazing. 
I know this can happen, but isn't it rare for BTC?

[1714643868]

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[Swordsoffreedom]

I haven't heard of a six block solve in less than ten minutes
I think the average is 2 to 3 at most unless their is a big hash change
Think that means the difficulty will rise faster now or nothing will be solved for a while ?
Edit see 305069
https://blockchain.info/

[zetaray]

This the reason why difficulty has been climbing month after month at an exponential rate. I blame it on too much hashing power on a single pool. I am happy I am not a miner, ROI seems further and further away.

[SirChiko]

It means that hashing power had to almost double, no? :O

[erono]

Bitcoin on gold rush would be a better on with extra testosterone.

[DeathAndTaxes]

It means that hashing power had to almost double, no? :O

If the network solved 4032 blocks in the time for 2016 (~2 weeks) then it would mean it doubled.   There is a huge amount of variance.  The average time between blocks over a period of 6 or even 48 blocks is mostly random noise.  Even for 144 blocks (~1 day) there is huge variance.

[ljudotina]

It's mix of hashing power going up, and little bit of luck (dont underestimate luck). You can see how diff and hash power is raising (or not) here: https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

[Ron~Popeil]

Next difficulty might be the last one for my old blades. 

[Bit_Happy]

It means that hashing power had to almost double, no? :O

If the network solved 4032 blocks in the time for 2016 (~2 weeks) then it would mean it doubled.   There is a huge amount of variance.  The average time between blocks over 6 blocks over even 48 blocks is mostly random noise.  Even for 144 blocks (~1 day) there is huge variance.

"Random noise" is correct, but I wonder if this has ever happened before?  (other than the really early days of mining)
I know I've never had a BTC transaction completely confirmed so fast.

[dserrano5]

"Random noise" is correct, but I wonder if this has ever happened before?  (other than the really early days of mining)
I know I've never had a BTC transaction completely confirmed so fast.

I recall having 4 confirmations in a couple of minutes. That was funding my btc-e wallet to do a quick trade, so the speed was really appreciated .

[fryarminer]

Next difficulty might be the last one for my old blades. 

I pulled out after last difficulty. The heat generated in the summer didn't justify the tiny quantities of BTC.
I did keep a Jalapeño and decided to solo mine with it. Odds are insanely stupid, but heck! Let's play!

Oh, and I kept my AMT miner - Those things are unsellable!

[Divinespark]

I also bailed out of my pool
The hashing escalation completely killed my RoI

[Meuh6879]

don't look the clock ... look the graph : https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty

[lucasjkr]

This the reason why difficulty has been climbing month after month at an exponential rate. I blame it on too much hashing power on a single pool. I am happy I am not a miner, ROI seems further and further away.

I don't understand why difficulty increases would be different whether the hashing power is concentrated in a single pool or spread out among many pools. Can expand more on that?

[dockster]

it doesn't usually happen that fast... (and sometimes I have to wait like 20 minutes to get my transaction confirmed)  They all worked for you lol

[ljudotina]

This the reason why difficulty has been climbing month after month at an exponential rate. I blame it on too much hashing power on a single pool. I am happy I am not a miner, ROI seems further and further away.

I don't understand why difficulty increases would be different whether the hashing power is concentrated in a single pool or spread out among many pools. Can expand more on that?

It is not. It's eather that poster before you has no idea what he's talking about, or tehere was misunderstanding in what he wanted to type and what he actualy typed. Hash speed is hash speed, in 1 pool or 10 of them. This blocks were just luck, nothing more. Hash speed is going up steady as it used to go up for months now.

[chaosPT]

How did they actually count the *confirmation ?

I can see 50-250 % noted something like that on the detail of my transaction

[DeathAndTaxes]

"Random noise" is correct, but I wonder if this has ever happened before?  (other than the really early days of mining)
I know I've never had a BTC transaction completely confirmed so fast.

In the early days of mining (2009) there actually was insufficient hashrate to meet the min difficulty of 1.  The average time between blocks varied from 12 minutes to 16 minutes.  If the protocol allowed the difficulty to be lowered below 1 it would have there was so little hashrate.    So it would have been less common in the early days.

It is certainly uncommon.  I am not sure how often it has occurred in the past but here are the odds.  Mining is a Poisson distribution.  So if difficulty and hashrate were in perfect equilibrium in an 11 minute period one would expect 1.1 blocks.  The probability of getting 6 or more events when 1.1 is expected is 0.1% so it would occur on average every 1033 events or roughly once a week.  However the hashrate currently exceeds the difficulty and the time between blocks averages less than 10 minutes (currently 8:59) so this means the probability is about 0.17% and it would be expected roughly once in 606 blocks.   Now those are the odds based on pure math.  In reality higher block frequency (on the best chain) is less common because in the real world there are propogation delays and that means the shorter the interval the more instead of 2 blocks in a row you have 2 competing blocks (A -> B1 & A-> B2 instead of A -> B -> C).   One last thing is this assumes the block timestamps were actually correct it is possible the first or last one was early or late and thus the actual period of time was longer.

Still it does show why Satoshi was so conservative with the target block interval.  Imagine if Bitcoin had a 30 second block and now imagine the tx volume was so high those blocks averaged 10MB.  The network would need to propagate and sync 60MB of data to all nodes in less than 33 seconds or there would be orphans (potentially multiple).

[eleuthria]

6 blocks in 10 minutes has happened a few times before, just like 0 blocks in 60 minutes happens about once a month.  6 in 10 minutes is a bit rarer though.

[Magic8Ball]

I think some 40-50 days back it was really fast. Sometimes there would be 3 confirms in a couple of minutes.