Quote from: Pmalek on February 03, 2024, 08:57:20 AM

I know that the Bitcoin mining difficulty adjusted not that long ago, but I don't remember the last time I saw the average block time being around 8 minutes.
In fact, the last couple of times the difficulty adjusted, I saw mempool.space showing a block time of about 11 minutes. Perhaps the Texan miners have turned their machines back on during the last cycle or some other devices woke up.

I think that you identified that issue with these various measurements right after the difficulty adjustment can be a bit misleading and they do not tend to last, so we get to the middle of the difficulty adjustment period, and the numbers tend to gravitate towards more normal in terms of whether the next adjustment is going to be up or down and surely it would be amazing if anything even close to an 8 minute average (which is right around 20%) could be sustained over more than a few days.... so by the time we get to the middle if it is even less than 9 minutes that would be interesting.. because it is greater than 10%.

We can look at the history of difficulty adjustments and see that an overwhelming majority of them are in the single digits..and even getting greater than 5% in either direction (which would be 9.5 minutes on the fast side and 10.5 minutes on the slow side) is BIG.. .

Quote from: BoXXoB on February 03, 2024, 03:53:54 PM

A few blocks ago transactions were confirming with slightly over 20 sat/vB fees. Now the recommended fee is almost 600 sat/vB. Absurd.

Maybe a reason to not rely upon some of the fee recommenders and instead get a kind of ballpark idea regarding if we might still be able to have our transaction go through quickly with way lower fees... yeah, those temporary high rates can surely have more negative effects for anyone wanting to make sure that his transaction goes through in the next block or even within an hour or so.. and if it is a very BIG transaction, then it may well be worth it to just suck up the higher fees, even if we likely realize that we had just experienced a temporary spike rather than anything that would be sustainable... even if the fees could start to gradually end up going back up.. so I am not saying that we can know that part, we can ONLY attempt to infer when we are doing our own attempts at estimation rather than relying upon fee recommendations within various wallets.