Topic: 41 minutes for a new block, difficulty wayyy too hard (Read 2809 times)

I don't see any block taking 41 minutes :

#Mining 

You're new I take... 41 minutes is rather quick or even average on big pools.  Some other pools can take days to find blocks #EclipseMC but is all proportionate to hashing power.  Don't mean you make less, just means you get pays less regularly.

Thats weird. I've never experienced that. What wallet did you use?

As each single confirmation is exponentially distributed (with mean = 10 minutes), the sum of 6 confirmations is Erlang-distributed with k=6, λ=10, and the probability of this sum being larger than 120 minutes is about 2.0341%

On top of the long blocks, I had one transaction skipped by two blocks, then anther skipped by three blocks, all on the same day. Both had the standard 10k Satoshi miners fee. That was completely ridiculous.

even 40 mins beat banks anyway

That is just normal variance in the network.  There was a block that took almost 24 hours back in 2010 I believe...

hopefully some major mining conglomerates have been forced to shut down, but i wouldn't count on it.

What's the probability that 6 confirmations take more than 2 hours?

Well in the last 30 minutes, 6 blocks were found. This is MUCH faster than the network desires. What will happen? Well luck will balance out or we see another spike in the difficulty. Its odd that the difficulty is higher than what it was when btc was worth more only a couple months back. Not much has changed in the way of hardware either.

41 minutes is not anything unusual in bitcoin, maybe more than one hour,but assuming blocks are 10 minutes by mean...

Correct, the point is we can see there is a small increase in hashing power before retarget therefore over the last week blocks have technically been confirming ever so slightly faster than expected and more miners are coming online not less like NEM minnow  suggested.

Most people don't understand that because of the Poisson process we should expect blocks to sometimes takes hours to confirm (albeit rarely) even if more miners are coming online and the average confirmation time is generally quicker than normal.

that is only so so to judge.


http://btc.blockr.io/charts   this chart is blocks per day.  0.00% rise = 144 blocks

feb 10---142
feb 11---159
feb 12---124
feb 13---144
feb 14---160
feb 15---142
feb 16---158

                      7 full days  should be 7 x 144 = 1008  actual is 1029   that is   +2.08%  

 since part of feb 9 should be included that actual number at 1am feb 17th is around

+2.22 %

Data reflects blocks are confirming faster than the expected Poisson distribution .

Only 1 instance of problem, or are blocks in general taking longer to be confirmed?

As said, if it only happened once, it might be the variance thing

False, if the hashrate was rising before the difficulty retarget one would assume greater than 63% of transactions to confirm quicker than 10 minutes.

10 min estimate is merely a Poisson probability where 63 % of transactions will be confirmed within 10 minutes or less. This means we should expect 37 % of transactions to take longer with a constant hashrate. The Poisson process also tells you that you should expect a rare occurrence of a confirmations taking hours even if blocks are confirming quicker than normal due to hash rate accelerating before the retarget.

You are spreading misinformation when there is no need to speculate. PoW allows us to watch and see in realtime if more miners are dropping off or coming online--

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png

Bitcoin Difficulty:    44,455,415,962
Estimated Next Difficulty:    46,065,256,617 (+3.62%)
Adjust time:    After 773 Blocks, About 5.3 days
Hashrate(?):    327,514,676 GH/s
Block Generation Time(?):    
1 block: 9.8 minutes
3 blocks: 29.3 minutes
6 blocks: 58.6 minutes
   
Updated:    19:25 (10.5 minutes ago)

When this thread was created there the data reflected a surge in hashrate and the data still reflects more miners are coming online. What this means is blocks are technically confirming slightly faster at the moment than if there was an equilibrium of hashing power.

some say it is variance, and it is but man....... that is a long time to wait for a transaction to clear. 

I bet part of it has to do with the miners dropping out.   The 10 minute estimation assumes that the hash rate is rising.  If it was steady it would be longer than that and if it was dropping even longer again. 

"It's too hard ... Waaah"

Lol 

Oil immersed mining caves are coming, hashing power will go thru da roof.

Yes some time is slow