The Bitcoin blockchain on Monday recorded the longest interval between the addition of two blocks in the recent history of cryptocurrency.
According to the blockchain observer, block 67785 was added at 15:12 Moscow time, and the next one after it – only at 17:14. Since most services require 2 to 6 confirmations to be credited with a BTC deposit, this means that users who sent their transactions in this and previous blocks had to wait longer than two hours.
This is the largest interval between blocks since October 13, 2011, when it took 141 minutes to add one block.
Events unfold amid a decline in bitcoin hash rate caused by interruptions in the supply of electricity to miners in China. During the day, the block time on the bitcoin network was 15 minutes 29 seconds with a target of 10 minutes. In just 24 hours, 92 blocks were added, whereas this value is usually around 144 blocks.
At the same time, the average transaction processing fees remain above $ 40. The size of the mempool, in which unconfirmed transactions are stored, is also growing. Now there are more than 200,000 of them, although a week ago there were less than 30,000.
The situation is aggravated by the record mining difficulty, set after another recalculation last week, just before the onset of problems for Chinese miners. Difficulty is recalculated every 2,016 blocks, which usually takes two weeks to mine. However, if the supply of electricity to the miners is not resumed in the near future, this segment could take up to three weeks. Then a record decrease in difficulty can occur, after which the block time will return to the usual 10 minutes.

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