Post
Topic
Board Mining
Re: extremely long blocks - what are the chances?
by
Meni Rosenfeld
on 12/01/2013, 21:20:32 UTC
I misread the first post initially and did some incorrect math but still demonstrates this is a relatively likely event.

The probability of one block taking 127 minutes or more (simplified):
2^-12.7 = ~ 1/6654 = average one in 46 days worth of blocks

Of course if you want to do real discrete statistics:

At target 0000000000000529B10000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  • difficulty = 3249549.5844872
  • Probability per single hash = 0.000000000000000071649034700583570
  • Expected number of hashes per 10 minutes = 13956922157834111

All calculations that have been shown expect the hashrate actually corresponds to difficulty, however there's enough of a pattern when summing many blocks-per-day-of-the-week intervals to know some people turn off mining on the weekends.
It's not 2^-12.7, it's e^-12.7 = 1 / 327748.

This is an example for an event that will probably not happen in 4 years, but still has a reasonable chance.