2 ms·
Reorganizations are not scarce. They get scarcer with the depth of the reorganization. Also, with the difficulty increasing, block are going to be rarer and y
by patio11 13y ago
Reorganizations are not scarce. They get scarcer with the depth of the reorganization.
Also, with the difficulty increasing, block are going to be rarer and you'll have to wait way longer to get a confirmation right?
Nope. The network adjusts the difficulty dynamically to target plus or minus ten minutes per block. The reason difficulty is increasing is to keep blocks coming in every plus or minus ten minutes rather than having ASICs generating them several thousand times a second, which is what would happen if the difficulty was still where it was when the entire Bitcoin network ran on Satoshi's Macbook.
And what if 3 guys find the same block, at the same time, at 3 very different places in the world? Can't imagine what would happen.
Feel free to reason it out. Miners each pick one of the three to try to build off. (Many Bitcoiners assume they pick randomly but I believe that to be a very problematic assumption.) Eventually, a miner wins the race. "His" ancestor block more than likely becomes the block which history adopts. The other two, more than likely, vanish and are never heard again. If your transaction was in one of them but not in the block which actually got adopted, you wait until it plays pingpong around the network or you retransmit.
This has happened hundreds of times before.