...is it taking longer for Bitcoin to confirm payments? I've been sitting here for about 45 minutes waiting for a recent payment to come through and not much going on. It's not a lot, but still...
yet just 12 hours ago someone was complaining of the opposite
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?
bitcoin is not a strict 10 minute rule.. its a fluid(average) 10 minute rule.
if theres a influx of fast block creation, then there will be a time of slow block creation just to balance the system.
and to add ontop of this. some pools are greedy and make 0 fee transactions wait longer (hate greed)
This is somewhat misleading, so I'll just clarify. After those blocks, if there were longer block times, it was merely because of chance. The last difficulty change (that is used to balance the system) was on 5th of June and the next one will be in a few days. Between these times, block times are not balanced in any way, they are randomly found every ten minutes or so, probably a little less than that now as the hash rate is usually growing all the time while the difficulty is adjusted only every 2016 block or approximately two weeks.
I posted these stats in another thread, but as I have not seen them posted on these forums before, I repost them in this thread since most have probably not seen my post in the mining section:
The probability of finding the next block inless than 1 minute: 9.5 %
less than 5 minutes: 39.3 %
less than 10 minutes: 63.2 %
less than 30 minutes: 95.0 %
As you are reading this, the probability that you have to wait more than one hour from this moment until the next block is found is about 0.25 %, small but significant and without checking the blockchain I am quite sure longer block times have been seen many many times before. It would be expected to see a 90 minute block time about once per year. (Well, of course this kind of prediction is not reliable, because in a year there will probably be things are not accounted for in the theoretical model, such as the hash rate drops due to something unexpected)
My calculations were based on the assumption of average ten minute block time, which happens when difficulty is "correct" for the current hash rate, and that finding Bitcoin blocks is a very good example of something that is well modeled by a Poisson process. At the time of this post the average block time is probably somewhat less than ten minutes, so the first four probabities should be a bit bigger and the probability for the next block to be found after an hour or more should be even less than 0.25 %.
