The original design of Bitcoin [BTC] aims to limit the block-time to 10 minutes. Nevertheless, due to the stiff competition between miners, the block-times are reduced to a considerable extent. Nevertheless, there are times when delay is caused as well.
Yesterday. BTC miners produced blocks with an average time of less than 4 minutes. Zack Voell, a market correspondent at Coindesk, and earlier with Blockstream pointed out in a tweet,
Bitcoin miners just produced 16 blocks in 63 minutes.
As per design, daily the miners must generate around 144 Bitcoins. However, due to the variance between hash-rate and difficulty, divergence from the mean is observed. Rafael Schultze-Kraft with Blockchain analytics, Glassnode, tweeted
Not improbable at all. Yes, #Bitcoin blocks are mined every 10 min *on average* – but people don’t seem to realize how large the variance is. We’ve seen everything between 1 block and 16 blocks per hour in the last month – nothing extraordinary.
Rafael notes that variance in the block-times comes with the design and the changes in huge mining ecosystem. Recently, after the miner capitulation due to the ‘Black Thursday’ crash, the block-times increased considerably reaching the 2018 bear capitulation levels. Nevertheless, the difficulty adjustment and price recovery following capitulation allowed accommodation of miners back to the system.
The average time for Bitcoin mining is around 9.66 minutes. Increased efficiency of mining hardware and bull market improves the average time, as more miners compete to mine Bitcoins. Whereas, bear markets and increased difficulty drives out profitability. Hence, with a set difficulty, the reduction in hash-rate increases the block time.
With Bitcoin halving set to occur in around 10 days, the markets (especially Crypto Twitter) can expect ardent criticism to the increased block-times post halving (which will reduce the rewards in half). Nevertheless, with difficulty adjustments after the next 2016 blocks (around 2 weeks) the block-time is expected to return to it’s previous levels.
Furthermore, analyzing the impacts of Bitcoin halving will take around 4-6 weeks when the miners and the market has effectively priced in the event.
How do you think the total hash-rate will respond to post Bitcoin halving? Please share your views with us.
from Coingape https://coingape.com/bitcoin-btc-has-gotten-faster/
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