Sunday, April 18, 2021

Today no Bitcoin blocks were mined for almost 2 hours

From 23:39 UTC to 01:26 UTC.

Maybe this is normal and I'm panicking for no reason.

In normal conditions it takes around 10 minutes to mine a block, 107 minutes is 10.7 times that number. Unless a pretty unlikely event happened, to me (I hope I'm wrong, I'm tired and should be sleeping right now) this seems to be linked to power outages in China:

https://www.moneycontrol.com/news/business/cryptocurrency/bitcoin-plunges-14-to-51541-due-to-power-outage-in-china-6784691.html

https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/21/04/20674195/power-outage-in-chinas-xinjiang-region-may-have-triggered-bitcoin-selloff

If miners located in proximity to each other suffer from a power outage and this causes the time to mine a block to multiply by ~11, the most likely reason seems to be that 10 out of 11 miners are located in that area. This is much higher than estimates of 65% of the hashpower being in China and would mean that Bitcoin mining is extremely centralized.

Could anybody provide an alternative explanation as for why it took so much time to mine block 679741?


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