16 blocks added to the Bitcoin network in an hour.
In an unusual deviation from the norm, bitcoin miners just produced 16 blocks in 63 minutes, according to the Blockstream bitcoin block explorer.
Each new bitcoin block is produced every 10 minutes, on average. The exact time required to produce a new block can vary significantly and depends in part on the current mining difficulty level, which adjusts every 2,016 blocks, or approximately once every two weeks.
Bitcoin’s anomalous spree of new blocks was first noticed by Étienne Larrivée, bitcoin developer at Satoshi Portal, a Canadian bitcoin financial services company. “Four blocks in less than a minute don’t feel natural, but it’s most likely only variance,” Larrivée told CoinDesk.
Such rapid block production could signal bitcoin’s current difficulty level is too low, meaning mining new blocks is too easy. Or it could be a simple coincidence, the product of block time variability.
The event coincides with a six-month high in the aggregate size of unconfirmed transactions in bitcoin’s mempool. Bitcoin transactions are sent to the mempool, which serves as a sort of holding depot after they have been verified by other non-mining nodes in the network. Miners then take transactions from the mempool and insert them into new blocks, which are then added to the Bitcoin blockchain.
The high number of unconfirmed transactions coinciding with such rapid block production is curious given that the job of bitcoin miners is to insert unconfirmed transactions in new blocks.
16 blocks added to the Bitcoin network in an hour.
Miners added 16 blocks within 63 minutes, of which 4 within 46 seconds.
The average block size in the Bitcoin network exceeded 1 megabyte
According to the principle established at the protocol level, the average release time of one block of bitcoin is 10 minutes. The value is maintained at this level by a mechanism for adjusting complexity, every 2,016 blocks, or about once every two weeks, adapting the complexity of the calculations depending on the speed of release of blocks at the previous stage.
Significant deviations from this value can be observed at shorter time intervals, both up and down. The key factors here are the amount of computing power provided by the miners at a particular moment, and variability.
It is noteworthy that the day before this, a six-month maximum was set for the total size of unconfirmed transactions in the bitcoin mempool. According to Blockchain.com, transactions with a total size of about 80 million bytes were awaiting confirmation.
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