Questions concerned with the expected or actual time between the discovery of two blocks.
Questions tagged [block-interval]
63 questions
60
votes
4 answers
What keeps the average block time at 10 minutes?
I've been told "the network" sets the difficulty level such that there will be one new block mined every ten minutes.
I imagine the rich would instead prefer to keep difficulty as high as possible to prevent other people winning their 50 BTC and…
billpg
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Why was the target block time chosen to be 10 minutes?
According to the wiki, 10 minutes was chosen as a 'tradeoff'.
Why ten minutes specifically? It is a tradeoff chosen by Satoshi between propagation time of new blocks in large networks and the amount of work wasted due to chain splits.
However in…
z7sg Ѫ
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22
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1 answer
What is the expected time until the next block is found?
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/3908/659 says:
Luckily, you'll only have to wait five minutes on average for a block to be found (blocks are one every ten minutes, so the expected delay until the next block is five minutes).
Upon reading it, I…
Chris Moore
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4 answers
Shortest and Longest block interval time ever recorded in Bitcoin
Bitcoin block interval time is on average 10 minutes, that is the difficulty is adjusted in such a way that every 10 minutes a miner will manage to find the right hash. This is just an average time though, the actual distribution for time…
Rexcirus
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15
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1 answer
What is the largest number of blocks that have ever occurred in 1 hour?
I have see questions about the longest delay between blocks and am aware of some blocks that occur in short succession. However I rarely see many blocks occurring very close to each other (which I suppose is normal since the average time between…
Jun Li
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15
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1 answer
Would a reduced block generation time make the Finney attack more difficult?
Related Question:
What can be done to mitigate the risk of a Finney attack?
The Finney attack is a form of double-spending attack where the attacker pre-mines a block containing a conflicting transaction and then publishes a transaction. A…
David Schwartz
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10
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3 answers
Why is Poisson instead of Negative Binomial used for computing attacker's potential progress?
In chapter 11 of the Satoshi's paper it is claimed that:
The recipient waits until the transaction has been added to a block
and z blocks have been linked after it. He doesn't know the exact
amount of progress the attacker has made, but…
Carlos Pinzón
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9
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2 answers
What is the longest time gap between blocks in 2010 - 2011?
I notice on blockexplorer that block 159531 was mined at 2011-12-28 10:53:53 and the next block was mined at 2011-12-28 11:24:58 - a gap of more than half an hour. I know the 10-minutes-per-block rule is just an average that the network tries to…
jl6
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8
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What is the standard deviation of block generation times?
A block is generated every 10 minutes, on average.
What is the standard deviation of this distribution?
It seems to be a measurable property, not a calculable one.
Is there a chart of the standard dev over time somewhere (should be added to…
ripper234
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8
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2 answers
How would faster blocks cause mining centralization?
I've heard that faster blocks would cause mining to become more centralized. How do these things fit together?
Murch
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2 answers
What stops miners/nodes lying about what time a block was mined?
From what I understand, the difficulty required by the proof-of-work in bitcoin is a function of block history, specifically the average time between last ~2000 blocks, with the intention that its hovers around the 10 minute mark.
The function…
BitPiggy
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6
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2 answers
Can a blockchain from the future be synchronized today?
If one or a few computers with blockchains from a future time line were connected to the Internet today, what would happen? This other question in Worldbuilding focus on possible consequences, but with this one I am trying to focus on the technical…
Armfoot
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5
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Are there any "slow" sidechains? What are the tradeoffs?
Are there any examples of sidechains which target a block time much longer than bitcoin? Could a sidechain be made "slow enough" such that the size of a proof (SPV proof?) for it could actually fit into and be verified by a mainchain bitcoin…
philbw4
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5
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1 answer
How does mining process takes Approximately 10 minutes?
I don't think that I fully understood the "difficulty" topic in blockchain, and therefore I don't understand how mining process takes close to 10 minutes.
If I have "Target" value (some hash value, which each block's value must be lower or equal to…
Roy Kuper
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5
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Why is a short blocktime considered to be unsafe?
I've heard a couple of times "a shorter blocktime is unsafe," (first about Litecoin and now Ethereum) but never understood why. Is it the higher probability of a fork? Why do some people consider a shorter blocktime less safe?
Steve Ellis
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