There is no excuse for spreading wrong information and urban legends.


You got it backwards.  You are hypertechnically (and incorrectly) seizing onto a number that has theoretical significance, but no practical significance to the ordinary user.  The 10-minute average is a practically useless number to most people.  It does not matter to everyday usage of Bitcoin.


Bitcoin works.  People are confused by the misinformation of “about 10 minutes”.  It makes them upset.  It makes them wonder if Bitcoin is broken, when they get hit with occasional hour-long confirmation times.  Then, they go to faux-decentralized, lower-security shitcoins that promise “instant finality blah blah blah”.

Moreover, you are wrong about the $1 million transaction.  Anyone transacting for $1 million in value probably wants more than one confirmation.  The more confirmations you wait, the more relevant the 10-minute average becomes.  If you wait six confirmations, it will more likely take closer to 60 minutes than a single confirmation is to take “about 10 minutes”.  That is how averages work!  It is why Bitcoin’s targeting algorithm works:  It targets an average over many blocks.

Please open up your desktop calculator, play around with the CDF and PDF of the exponential distribution with λ = 0.1 (or λ = 1/600 if you are measuring in seconds), and get a feel for the extraordinary shape of a curve that defies human intuition.  You will soon be appalled at just how useless the 10-minute average is for ordinary, everyday usage.

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Technical misinformation should always be corrected.  The notion that “a block takes about 10 minutes” is an urban legend.  It is counterproductive.  It is confusing to users in everyday real-life practical scenarios.  Please stop spreading it.