Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
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Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#2"Assume a hashrate and difficulty corresponding to 1 block per 10 minutes. If I uniformly randomly pick a point in time, what is the expected time between the previous block and the next block?"
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#3"Assume a hashrate and difficulty corresponding to 1 block per 10 minutes. If I uniformly randomly pick a point in time, what is the expected time between the previous block and the next block?" https://twitter.com/pwuille/status/967878361782652928
This is like a common core math problem. Poorly worded to the point of obscuring any real math talent that could be applied in finding a “correct” result, and instead we get to debate what the question means.
A more interesting question, I think, is given a POW algorithm which adjusts difficultly to target a 10 minute block rate, and assuming network hash rate is constant and propagation is instant, what percentage of blocks take 20 minutes to solve? 60 minutes? And what’s the odds of solving two blocks in <= 60 seconds?
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#4The Monty Hall problem for the 21st century.
Note that the dependency of the expected value on sampling method also show up in other places, like Benford's law. The expected value of the first digit of a number drawn from a uniform distribution depends on how the upper bound of that distribution is chosen.
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#5The article on the "hitchhiker's paradox" that this links to made this much more clear to me (as well as being shorter): https://the8layers.com/2016/10/30/how-long-will-you-wait-hit...
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#6"Assume a hashrate and difficulty corresponding to 1 block per 10 minutes. If I uniformly randomly pick a point in time, what is the expected time between the previous block and the next block?" https://twitter.com/pwuille/status/967878361782652928
This is like a common core math problem. Poorly worded to the point of obscuring any real math talent that could be applied in finding a “correct” result, and instead we get to debate what the question means . A more interesting question, I think, is given a POW algorithm which adjusts difficultly to target a 10 minute block rate, and assuming network hash rate is constant and propagation is instant, what percentage…
Can you explain the multiple meanings you see in the question?
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#7Bitcoin mining = "Guess a random number between 1 and 5"
If the network guesses too fast due to more cumulative guesses per second, the target number increases.
Interesting historical antidote, in early November of 2017 there was an event where it became more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash. During that time about 60% of the miners left BTC Core in unison to focus on BTC Cash. Transactions for BTC Core started taking upwards two to three times as long as there wasn't enough hash power to guess the magic number in time.
Eventually the miners returned to mine BTC core and transaction times returned to normal, other than the backlog in the memory pool that built up during that period.
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#8"Assume a hashrate and difficulty corresponding to 1 block per 10 minutes. If I uniformly randomly pick a point in time, what is the expected time between the previous block and the next block?" https://twitter.com/pwuille/status/967878361782652928
This is like a common core math problem. Poorly worded to the point of obscuring any real math talent that could be applied in finding a “correct” result, and instead we get to debate what the question means . A more interesting question, I think, is given a POW algorithm which adjusts difficultly to target a 10 minute block rate, and assuming network hash rate is constant and propagation is instant, what percentage…
I don't think the question is poorly stated, and all of your questions miss the interesting bit of this one, which is that you are more likely to randomly select a long interval rather than a short one.
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#9Bitcoin mining = "Guess a random number between 1 and 5" If the network guesses too fast due to more cumulative guesses per second, the target number increases. Interesting historical antidote, in early November of 2017 there was an event where it became more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash. During that time about 60% of the miners left BTC Core in unison to focus on BTC Cash. Transactions for BTC Core started taking…
BCH is frequently more profitable than BTC -- the mining power constantly oscillates between the two.
Checkout fork.lol which tracks DARI, an estimate of the profitability of mining the coin, you see how the more profitable one frequently switches:
Re: Why Is It Taking 20 Minutes to Mine This Bitcoin Block?
#10Bitcoin mining = "Guess a random number between 1 and 5" If the network guesses too fast due to more cumulative guesses per second, the target number increases. Interesting historical antidote, in early November of 2017 there was an event where it became more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash. During that time about 60% of the miners left BTC Core in unison to focus on BTC Cash. Transactions for BTC Core started taking…
The excessive mempool size caused a lot of trouble for us when attempting to read it from bitcoind. Since the mempool was so large, JSON-RPC requests were taking upwards of 15-20 seconds. I’m surprised such a critical endpoint is so sub-optimised.