Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Merits 4 from 1 user
Re: [Quiz] Answer the Bitcoin question and earn merits! #2
by
Amphenomenon
on 22/03/2024, 11:02:13 UTC
⭐ Merited by BlackHatCoiner (4)
So in the end the exactly didn't matter and I guessed this was why after this:

Pr (3 block) = 1 - (Pr( ≤2 block) + Pr (>3 block))
I still got the same 0.06133 which is roughly same as the 0.06131
But you're calculating exactly three in here. If P(block=3) = 1 - {every other possibility than P(block=3)), then you're calculating for exactly three. If you wanted to calculate for at least three, you would work out P(block >= 3), which is just 1 - P(block = 0) - P(block = 1) - P(block = 2) = 0.080302 ~= 8%.
 
I was actually working base on this
Question: What is the chance of having exactly three blocks mined within the next 10 minutes? You can assume that a new block is mined every 10 minutes on average.

Quote
Another fun fact. The probability of not finding any block for 10 minutes is the same as finding exactly one block; about 36.8%.
I actually discovered this earlier, yesterday during my calculations though didn't speak about it or actually showed my working after I got a value similar to the probability of mining 3 blocks https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/03/22/J7oDT.jpeg
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/03/22/J77k1.jpeg
https://www.talkimg.com/images/2024/03/22/J75Zl.jpeg

I wanted to check reality to see how often this occurred (start with Bitcoin block data available in CSV format, and download time.txt), but there is no accurate data on block times. In some cases the block time moves backwards.
That will be a little difficult. Block times are not accurate, as rightly said. Your best source of information is debug.log (in which it is written when your node received the blocks). But it won't be accurate either, because hashrate does not remain constant for a long time.
franky1 said this earlier on this thread