Right now we're at a little under 6 hours without a block. Not exactly hard to believe, that's only ~6x difficulty, something which happens at least once a month (probably more).
Is there a good reference where I can learn about the relationship between the time between blocks, the pool size, and network difficulty? Specifically, how can I look at this info and see if the time is 2x difficulity etc.? Thanks.
I mostly just report with "napkin math" figures. I did bump the shift share count up slightly, but prior to my post:
Shifts were taking ~55 minutes, with a shift length of ~4 billion shares. The translates to ~4.3 billion shares per hour. Current network difficulty is ~3.8 billion. The last block for the pool (at the time of my post) was 6 hours ago. That means we had done approximately 25.8 billion shares, which is ~6.7 times the current network difficulty.
The even easier version (doesn't factor in the current shift): Check how many open shifts currently have 0 blocks. Multiply that by shift length (4 billion as of my previous post, 4.5 billion going forward), and compare that number to network diff.