A total of five sequential blocks (from 918864 to 918860) were recently mined on the Bitcoin blockchain, in a period of 20 minutes.
The Bitcoin community has been puzzled by such a dizzying pace. Blocks 91861 and 91860 were mined within mere seconds of each other.
Still normal?
Normally, a block gets produced every 10 minutes. Earlier today, however, a block was being produced roughly every four minutes on average.
Bitcoin enthusiast Dan McArdle claims that such an abnormally high Bitcoin production rate is not as rare as it might seem at first glance.
"Don't have the data in front of me, but anecdotally I recall a number of such occurrences over the years," McArdle explained.
It is worth noting that each block has a random mining time. In accordance with the exponential distribution, the probability of mining a block very quickly drops substantially.
For instance, the probability that two blocks were minted just 14 seconds apart is just 1.4% per block. This is extremely unlikely but not impossible, which is why a large number of blocks can sometimes get mined within a very short span of time, McArdle explains.
As McArdle explains, the recent blocks were "well within the expected statistical Poisson distribution," which describes the probability of a number of events taking place within a certain time interval.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team