I think you missed my point. Using Bitcoin as example, there are few occurrence when time between 2 blocks is far higher than 10 minute interval. The worst one i know is between block 679785[1] and 679786[2].
That's ~2 hours difference. You may want to check block 74638, nearly 7 hours.
You can use (CDF) - exponential distribution to determine the time between blocks (don't use Poisson distribution for this purpose). below is a simple pyton code that does that for you
Code:
import math
def percent_blocks_separated_by_more_than(minutes):
mean = 10
rate = 1 / mean
percentage = math.exp(-rate * minutes) * 100
return percentage
minutes = 60 # Example: 60 mins
result = percent_blocks_separated_by_more_than(minutes)
print(f"{result:.3f}% of blocks are separated by more than {minutes} minutes.")
def percent_blocks_separated_by_more_than(minutes):
mean = 10
rate = 1 / mean
percentage = math.exp(-rate * minutes) * 100
return percentage
minutes = 60 # Example: 60 mins
result = percent_blocks_separated_by_more_than(minutes)
print(f"{result:.3f}% of blocks are separated by more than {minutes} minutes.")
A random example > 0.248% of blocks are separated by more than 60 mins.
Forking and orphaning are natural consequences of competitive mining.
Nah, they are not; maximizing profitability is the only "natural consequences of competitive mining" and you can't make more profit by forking the network and rendering it worthless, as opposed to just play fair, a 51% attack on btc for profit is never going to happen, owning 50% or even half of that means you have tens of billions of dollars at stake, nobody with that amount of money is going to attempt to damage the network, the only thread would be goverments doing it just to damage BTC, but those don't have to go that far, just ban BTC and threaten to send everyone who uses it to jail. My take on this is that BTC has grown too large that everyone, including governments, has only two ways to deal with it.
1- Be part of the game and attempt to profit.
2- Regulate the market to keep it under control.