Quote from: inBitweTrust on February 18, 2015, 01:37:20 AM

Quote from: NEM minnow on February 18, 2015, 01:23:14 AM

some say it is variance, and it is but man....... that is a long time to wait for a transaction to clear.

I bet part of it has to do with the miners dropping out. The 10 minute estimation assumes that the hash rate is rising. If it was steady it would be longer than that and if it was dropping even longer again.

False, if the hashrate was rising before the difficulty retarget one would assume greater than 63% of transactions to confirm quicker than 10 minutes.

10 min estimate is merely a Poisson probability where 63 % of transactions will be confirmed within 10 minutes or less. This means we should expect 37 % of transactions to take longer with a constant hashrate.

You are spreading misinformation when there is no need to speculate. PoW allows us to watch and see in realtime if more miners are dropping off or coming online--

https://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty
http://bitcoin.sipa.be/speed-lin.png

Bitcoin Difficulty:    44,455,415,962
Estimated Next Difficulty:    46,065,256,617 (+3.62%)
Adjust time:    After 773 Blocks, About 5.3 days
Hashrate(?):    327,514,676 GH/s
Block Generation Time(?):
1 block: 9.8 minutes
3 blocks: 29.3 minutes
6 blocks: 58.6 minutes

Updated:    19:25 (10.5 minutes ago)

When this thread was created there the data reflected a surge in hashrate and the data still reflects more miners are coming online. What this means is blocks are technically confirming slightly faster at the moment than if there was an equilibrium of hashing power.

that is only so so to judge.

http://btc.blockr.io/charts this chart is blocks per day. 0.00% rise = 144 blocks

feb 10---142
feb 11---159
feb 12---124
feb 13---144
feb 14---160
feb 15---142
feb 16---158

7 full days should be 7 x 144 = 1008 actual is 1029 that is +2.08%

since part of feb 9 should be included that actual number at 1am feb 17th is around

+2.22 %