Bitcoin Institute

Did block generation crawl to a halt?

8 messages BitcoinTalk Unknown, Quantumplation, MacRohard, mtgox, Satoshi Nakamoto, lachesis, ByteCoin July 18, 2010 — July 19, 2010
Unknown July 18, 2010 00:20 UTC

adgf

Quantumplation July 18, 2010 03:23 UTC

The difficulty gets reevaluated and adjusted every 2016 blocks.

MacRohard July 18, 2010 03:24 UTC

I created a realtime graph of the current block generation speed here;

http://titania.smutfairy.com/~rm/time.gif

mtgox July 18, 2010 15:12 UTC

MacRohard: 😎 graph. It would be nice if it should time on the x axis and number of blocks on the y

Satoshi Nakamoto July 18, 2010 23:35 UTC

Nice graph!  A moving average to smooth it out would be nice.

http://nullvoid.org/bitcoin/statistix.php says 212 blocks in the last 24 hours, or 8.8 per hour.

lachesis July 19, 2010 00:28 UTC

Satoshi, why does difficulty adjust so rarely? It would seem to me that it would be better to adjust once every 50 blocks or so.

MacRohard July 19, 2010 15:13 UTC

@satoshi, I’ve change it to plot the last 127 blocks and also it gives you the average of those 127.

ByteCoin July 19, 2010 16:07 UTC

Thanks for the statistics.

Transactions in block 68477 took under 3 minutes to get confirmed but transactions in block 68780 took over two hours!

The fact that a merchant can’t tell a customer accurately how long they have to wait to get their goods will be a major barrier to adoption of the current scheme.

I think this is the most persuasive reason for changing to a fixed block generation scheme as outlined in

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=425.0

ByteCoin