7 ms·
Bitcoin Fails to Produce 1 Block for over an Hour
- PretzelPirate 4y agoI don't like Bitcoin, but this isnt news. Blocks aren't created at a set interval because it's a poison process that averages out to 10 minutes. Even the article itself says that this is expected to happen once every 34 days.
- bombcar 4y agoThe only time this is interesting is if we get an inversion or whatever they call it where the difficulty goes up just before a bunch of miners stop mining (because the price dropped or whatever) and we get to a point where there's not enough miners to make blocks to get to the next difficulty adjustment.
- ISL 4y ago*Poisson. (the spelling matters here)
- elmomle 4y agoThank you--in spite of my stats background, I assumed the author was conveying their distaste for proof-of-work.
- twawaaay 4y agoAlso, it is capital letter because it is named after this guy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%A9on_Denis_Poisson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sim%C3%A9on_Denis_Poisson Has an amazingly long list of things named after him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Sim%C3%A9on_Denis_Poisson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Sim...
- dboreham 4y agoBecause: one person's fish is another person's poisson.
- SnowHill9902 4y agoWell some fish are poisonous.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- PretzelPirate 4y agoThanks. I actually typed it multiple times and spelled it correctly while fighting autocorrect, but it won in the end.
- rizoma_dev 4y ago(journalist voice) One might say it is a poison. For the planet, that is
- hackeraccount 4y agoThis gets at one of the things I've never quite understood about Bitcoin. Over time the effort to mine a coin goes up - there's a ultimately a set limit on the number of coins that will be produced. Mining coins is where the effort for all operations comes from. What if the impetus for mining - an increasing worth for a rarer coin - doesn't scale? Couldn't you have a situation where fewer miners reduces the speed of operations so there's less demand which is a feedback on itself.
- ISL 4y agoThe idea was to bootstrap a community of blockchain processors (miners) into existence. Once all the coins are gone, the transaction fees will remain.
- hackeraccount 4y agoAh - I'd forgotten about transaction fees.
- benj111 4y agoA comment above refers to this happening before and transaction fees rising to tempt back miners. This suggests that transaction fees are being subsidised at the moment. So long term what are transaction fees going to look like?
- thatguy0900 4y agoEdited: Apparently I am incorrect.
- remram 4y agoTransaction fees are set freely by the individuals creating those transactions.
- tinus_hn 4y agoMining is solving some kind of puzzle. If not a lot of blocks get mined, the difficulty the puzzle is reduced. This way the system automatically balances so mining a block costs about as much as you gain when you solve the puzzle first.
- throwawayallday 4y agoLess than 20 transactions per second. Mindbogglingly slow.
- xeromal 4y agoThis will replace mastercard, we swears on the precious
- RedNifre 4y agoBitcoin's Lightning network solves this issue.
- throwawayallday 4y agoExcept it doesn't.
- RustyRussell 4y agoStrange; I've been working on it for over seven years on the assumption that it does. Would you like to expand your point?
- Ferret7446 4y agoLess than 20 irreversible transactions per second. Regular financial infrastructure requires maybe a few weeks or months or years for a reasonably irreversible transaction. Layer 2/Lightning can process far greater number of transactions for a far lower fee with a cryptographic guarantee of submission to the underlying blockchain. There are some kinks of course, as there always are.
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> Regular financial infrastructure requires maybe a few weeks or months or years for a reasonably irreversible transaction TIL wires take years, not minutes.
- 4y ago
- AustinDev 4y agoThis has happened at least 1573 times.. therefore it is not news. It becomes news if block time were to go to 1 hour average for a few days. However, when this scenario has occurred in the past transactions fees went so high that it made sense for miners to turn their miners back on to harvest the high fees.
- imtringued 4y agoIt makes the headlines for Solana though because everyone expects their transactions to confirm within 500ms not one hour.
- gojomo 4y agoIf only there were a crypto-literate news outlet capable of putting this sort of thing in context like that. Say, a news-desk specializing in crypto-coin topics. They could call it coin-news, or crypto-desk, or something like that!
- snarkyturtle 4y agoIf you're at a cash register and there's a slight chance that when you use your credit card that it won't accept a payment for an hour, wouldn't you not want to use that credit card?
- kelseyfrog 4y agoThis is a actually a feature. No, I don't care to explain. Cryptoapologists know what I mean.
- aliqot 4y agoThis is nothing, it failed to produce blocks for -days- before There are anomalous blocktimes throughout the entire history. Long times, short times, even negative times. Press play here for an order tabular list of all anomalous block times outside of a normal deviation: https://blockchainsql.io/wkeno3 https://blockchainsql.io/wkeno3
- gojomo 4y agoOther sources report the only 'days' delay was between block 0 and block 1 – and thus likely an idiosyncratic effect of the launch. Apparently, also, there were a few more >20hr blocks in the 1st half of 2009, when interest was very, very low. So while technically true, without further details, your comment implies something that's not really reflective of the system today. Of course, as a stochastic process, it's possible that the delay reaches any length whatsover. But it becomes vanishingly unlikely, under the rough assumption that hash power stays at the level observed at the last difficulty-adjustment. By the formula Tadge Dryja shared, a 1-day (1440 minute) delay would be expected once every 6.568×10^57 average Gregorian years, or far far far longer than the age of the universe so far: https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281%2Fe%5E%28-1440%2F10%29%29%2F144+days https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=%281%2Fe%5E%28-1440%2F1... (If large amounts of hash power disappear for any reason – war, regulations, sabotage, bugs, massive price drops, etc – then all bets are off.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sidewndr46 4y agoAnyone arguing a delay between block 0 and block 1 is not arguing from a rational standpoint. It is akin to arguing that an airline had days of no flights where they didn't fly any routes at all, because the company was obviously founded and incorporated at least a few weeks before their first commercial service was introduced.
- kevincox 4y agoHow can negative times happen? Each block contains a hash of the previous block so in order to mine the next block you would need to know the hash of the previous block which more or less means that you need to know the previous block which means it existed first. Is this some play going on with embedded timestamps or something that are not necessarily monotonic?
- myroon5 4y agoSlowest/fastest blocks in the last decade: Couple ~2 hour blocks in recent years, but seems like timing isn't precise enough for meaningful fastest blocks: https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/77783/shortest-and-longest-block-interval-time-ever-recorded-in-bitcoin https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/77783/shortest-a... Ethereum has very consistent fast blocks post-merge: https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/xgn4n7/heres_a_better_version_of_the_chart_i_shared_the/ https://old.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/xgn4n7/heres_a_be...
- nullc 4y ago::eyeroll:: 1 hour+ gaps should be expected to happen on average every 2.5 days given the expected 10 minutes between blocks. This is the absolute state of "bitcoin" journalism.