is it actually 10 minutes or does the individual block size being smaller mean the amount of time it would take be less?
Discussion
It is on *average* 10 minutes, but each block is random (normal distribution).
Does not depend at all on block size.
Actually… finding a block is a Poisson process so time is modeled by exponential distribution
consulting the book of knowledge:
Oh right, Poisson, thanks 👍
On average, blocks are mined every 10 min. Block size does not determine speed.
They are guessing and checking thousands of numbers called nonces to see if it produces a valid block with the transaction data that will be included. There’s no way to cheat or fake this process.
The protocol is designed using probabilies to identify a target difficulty resulting in 10 minute block times.
When more hash power comes online, blocks come faster, so difficulty would go up.
When hash power goes offline, the next difficulty would go down so the lower hash rate still works out to ~10 minute blocks
It retargets every 2016 blocks
So, technically it’s random. Miners around the world are competing to find the next block, and the algorithm automatically gets harder or easier (adjusting every once in a while) depending on how much total hashing (mining) power is being put into it. On average, it balances out to every 10 minutes.
If you go to https://mempool.space you can see a visualization of this and scroll back through the blocks to see the time between them.
another dumb question: some blocks have say
Transactions ~2000
size ~1,600,000 bytes
Others have
Transactions ~800
but size is 2,000,000 bites
how less transaction have more size?
I know it doesn’t seem like it, but there are lots of different types of possible transactions, some requiring more data than others, and you pay fees per byte.
Transactions can be anywhere from ~100 bytes up to 400 kB (technically they can go higher, but not without direct miner involvement).