Aside, another pet peeve of mine: There is no such thing as “the mempool”.
There are mempools, plural. Each independent P2P full node has its own mempool. The purpose of the blockchain is globally to synchronize the substantive content of mempools, and to set the order of transactions in mempools authoritatively without a trusted central authority.
This is no mere quibble. A misunderstanding of the nature and plurality of mempools causes numerous half-baked newbie ideas for “improving” Bitcoin, or “to make mining more efficient”, essentially by replacing the blockchain with an insecure global mempool (singular). Usually, such schemes are not even fault-tolerant—let alone Byzantine fault-tolerant.
The block time has nothing to do what's going on in the mempool.
There is no direct correlation between the transactions in the mempool and the average block time.
--snip--
Yup you are definitely right. for every transcation miners need to solve a mathematical problem and everyday million of transcation had been done. that's why need a long time for complete a transcation block. it take more then 10 minutes
It has been said in this very thread: the time between 2 blocks is NOT related to the amount of transactions in the mempool, nor the amount of transactions in the (valid) blocks (well, maybe it'll take a couple milliseconds more to relay a "full" valid block vs an "empty" one, but this isn't significant imho).
Besides the usual problems with noisy misinformation, what concerns me most is that, as I mentioned in my prior post, POS propaganda is actively spreading the incorrect notion that more transactions = more work in POW, or that scaling the TPS rate would require more energy.
It was
already a popular mistake. It is now being amplified.
If all miners would go on strike, and start mining empty blocks (only the coinbase tx), it would still take an average of ~10 minutes between two blocks...
Frequently mining empty blocks in a way that seemed intentional has been done before, probably as an attack on Bitcoin. That was an accusation frequently leveled at Bitmain and their pools, a few years ago. IIUC, empty blocks have sometimes been mined due to poorly-designed equipment; but I can’t speak to the veracity of that claim, as I do not have experience mining.
(Just to elaborate. Not trying to teach
you, mocacinno.
:-))
If the average time between 2 empty blocks was > 10 minutes, the difficulty would go down on the next difficulty adjustment (and vice versa).
The average time between 2 blocks is only significantly influenced by the difficulty and the sum of the hashrate. When the hashrate changes, during the next retarget, the difficulty will be adjusted aswell (and vice versa).
I think this should be clarified: The only way we have to measure the global hashrate is to estimate it from divergence of the average block time from the expected average. I think that many newbies imagine that there is some hashrate meter that directly measures the hashrate. Of course, that is impossible in a decentralized system where miners can be anonymous, and the only way to know that they even exist is when blocks show up in P2P network gossip.