Virtual money is persistently entering the lives of businessmen and investors. The blog site will help them verify the actual payment, exchange and other Bitcoin transactions.
First, let us recall how such operations generally occur. Funds intended to be sent to the recipient (transfers for the required amount previously received in favor of the owner of the personal wallet) are transferred using a special code. But until the bitcoins reach the recipient, the transaction cannot be considered completed.
To carry out an operation, it must be included in the so-called block - a set of transfers created by miners and corresponding to a specific software solution. All Bitcoin transactions can be tracked on the network, as they are open to any interested parties. There are no specific names, because one of the principles of this system is anonymity. However, you can find the address (individual code) of a user, where you can see all received and sent amounts with confirmations.
In practice, this entire process does not go smoothly. Let's deal with one of the existing problems of Bitcoin transactions.
Since there are more and more such operations, many new blocks are constantly required. Their creation, due to the complexity of the process, does not occur as quickly as we would like. As a result, a specific phenomenon arises - Mempool (queue of translations awaiting execution).
Recently, the Bitcoin network has seen repeated cases of freezing of more than 100 thousand transactions simultaneously. Moreover, as a rule, transactions with the lowest commissions fall into the queue.
Please note: the standard operation algorithm assumes that mining one block takes approximately 10 minutes.
Where can I check if a Bitcoin transaction has taken place?
The process of crediting bitcoins does not yet work like clockwork and depends on a number of factors:
- exchange rate fluctuations;
- network stability;
- fee size.
A transaction is considered confirmed if it is included in blocks, the number of which ranges from 1 to 6 (based on the number of bitcoins). Accordingly, depositing small amounts should last approximately 10 minutes, and large ones should take no more than 1 hour.
The obscurity confuses users and prevents them from being confident in carrying out important Bitcoin transactions. Therefore, they must clearly know where this fact can be reliably verified.
To find out the information you are interested in about transactions, go to the official website of the system. By specifying the cryptographic code of the recipient or the transfer number known to you in the search line, you can see the necessary data on the number of blocks in which the declared operations are included.
To check transactions, you can use the service *blockchain.info*
To reduce your wait time, use the following tips:
- Transfer in large amounts (such Bitcoin transactions have a higher status, so they are processed first).
- Set the commission size manually (the larger it is, the more preferable the transfer is for the miner).
- Choose specialized platforms, such as BitPay or Coinbase, that offer instant Bitcoin transactions using internal tools.
If the digital money has not yet arrived to the addressee, then sooner or later it will be done anyway. Remember, until the operation is completed, the owner of the funds is still the sender, who can change the initial transfer parameters (for example, commission) and thereby speed up the process.
Sending or receiving bitcoin is simple. But behind this elementary process lies a whole ecosystem.
Its cornerstone is transaction confirmation.
Contents:
Why do you need Bitcoin when there are a whole bunch of banks?
Although many crypto enthusiasts believe that cryptocurrency can completely reshape the global financial system, the principle of its operation is very similar to traditional banking fundamentals.
Let's say a person from Europe needs to send money to his grandmother in South Africa. He goes with them to the bank. The financial institution accepts the money and sends it to its intermediary – the correspondent bank. He, in turn, sends the money directly to the South African bank, where the grandmother can finally collect it.
Each of these banks verifies the identity of the original customer and their money. Because of this, a bank “parcel” can take more than a week to reach the final recipient.
Moreover, it itself can grow depending on the country of location of the sending bank and its working currency.
Bitcoin- the most famous cryptocurrency in the world - allows you to get rid of this long chain of intermediaries, as well as speed up and reduce the cost of the process.
But, just like with a bank transfer, the transaction on the Bitcoin network must be confirmed. Without verification, the recipient will never be able to receive crypto coins.
How and who confirms transactions on the Bitcoin network
Miners are the “worker bees” of the Bitcoin blockchain.
Most of those “uninitiated” in the principles of operation of cryptocurrencies believe that the main purpose of miners is . This is wrong.
The main task of miners is to confirm transactions. They do this by mining blocks. Each block in the Bitcoin network weighs 1MB.
When information about transfers “clogs” this entire space, the block is considered closed and confirmed.
For mining, miners use large computing power. The first miner to close a block receives a reward for his work in the form of bitcoins.
Each transaction on the Bitcoin network must receive 6 confirmations. This means that information on it is still included in 6 subsequent blocks.
The creators of Bitcoin came up with this system in order to avoid double spending of the same cryptocurrency, otherwise anyone could use crypto coins in endless quantities.
As soon as the miners confirm the transaction 6 times, the bitcoins arrive at the recipient’s address and he can dispose of them.
Some services may change the number of confirmations for crediting to the balance.
Magic number
The number 6 was not chosen by chance. The theory says that in this protection system, an attacker must accumulate more than 10% of the power of the entire network in order to double spend Bitcoin.
Crypto fraudsters would have to invest millions of dollars in computing power of this level.
Therefore, the six reduces the risk of such a situation occurring.
On the other hand, they may well receive 6 confirmations in a row and verify the transfer.
The miners themselves can use the bitcoins they received as rewards only after confirming 100 blocks.
Proof of Work
To make the Bitcoin network fair, the creators came up with the concept Proof of Work– proof of the work done.
According to this concept, the more power a miner has, the greater the likelihood that he will receive a reward for verification.
Proof of Work in the Bitcoin network has disadvantages: miners compete with each other and over time, more and more power is required to find a block.
Because of this they become more expensive.
Moreover, the amount of energy consumed is increasing, which harms the entire planet.
Can I become a Bitcoin miner?
Yes. Anyone can become a miner. True, now the “entry point” is too high. There are millions of miners in the world.
Some have huge data centers that cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
To compete with them, you will have to fork out a lot for equipment and electricity.
Therefore, ordinary users mine those coins that are cheaper, but their generation is not so expensive.
How to speed up Bitcoin transaction confirmation
Every crypto investor can speed up Bitcoin transaction confirmation.
First way– increase the translation priority. For this you will have to pay a higher commission to the miners.
Second option– send bitcoin with multi-signature. considers such translations as more reliable, and accordingly, they are more likely to undergo verification. Multisignature also increases the security of the transfer itself.
Third way- to be open". It is considered open when complete information about the identity of the sender and recipient is recorded in the block. The speed of getting into a block increases, but one of the main principles of cryptocurrencies – anonymity – suffers.
There are also many centralized cryptocurrency exchange services.
They developed and implemented their own transaction systems.
They can pass through this ecosystem instantly.
There is a prerequisite– the sender and recipient must be clients of such a service, and transactions must take place between addresses registered on the platform.
The transaction is not confirmed for a long time. Have I lost my bitcoins?
No. On the Bitcoin network, confirmation may take a long time.
For example, the BTC price rose or fell sharply, and investors rushed to trade on exchanges.
Or in the mempool of unconfirmed transfers, there are too many high-priority transactions (with a higher commission), which seem to go “out of turn.”
In this case, the network may be congested and confirmation may take longer.
The only option left here is to wait.
There are also failures in the blockchain, for example, due to a massive attack, and confirmation can be canceled. There is no need to worry, the bitcoins will be returned to the sender’s address and the transaction can be repeated.
So you’ve been “standing” here for the second year already! Yes, I’m waiting for confirmation of the bitcoin transaction. He probably appointed a small commission. (From an anecdote overheard on the blockchain)
Simpler, faster and easier! I will be guided by these “slogans” in order to clearly explain to you how long it takes to confirm a transaction. But first, let's list the questions that we will try to answer:
How it works?
Sorry, but I will “load” 😉 Without this, it will not be possible to understand the principle of manipulation with cryptocurrency.
1) Information about transactions with bitcoins is recorded in special blocks, which represent a list of transactions. If you add blocks into a chain, you will get the history of the “circulation” of the cryptocurrency.
2) A block consists of a header and a list of transactions. The header contains the hash codes of the transactions, its own and the hash of the previous block. The first in the list is a transaction that specifies the reward (commission) for creating a new block.
3) To verify the authenticity of cryptocurrency transactions, transactions must be validated on the blockchain. It is a distributed database. Parts of it are stored on many computers on the Bitcoin network.
Confirming and recording transaction data into blocks is a complex process and requires powerful equipment. Computing processes take place on the side of the user connected to Bitcoin.
Confirming a transaction is when it is added to the list of transactions in a block.
After a transaction with cryptocurrency is carried out, the accounts on the sender’s and recipient’s sides are not updated immediately. In traditional user applications, to confirm a transaction, six blocks must be found that prove its validity.
In this case, the user performing the operation can reduce the number of checks. This should be done if you are dealing with a small amount of bitcoins. This simplifies and speeds up the transaction confirmation process.
If the crypto money transfer has not been verified, the system returns the funds back to the sender’s wallet.
How long should I wait?
On average it takes me from 20 minutes to an hour.
The waiting time depends on several components:
1)Congestion of the “crypto network”— over the past two years, the number of transactions with bitcoins has increased more than 8 times. This can be seen in the graph below.
It shows the growth in the number of trillions of hashes performed per second on the Bitcoin network.
There are also spikes in the grid, when the average number of transactions in blocks increases, and the size of the blocks itself increases to a critical value. This happened last year.
A similar situation also arises when a huge number of unconfirmed transactions accumulate.
2) Small commission– in the “crypto network”, transactions with a large reward to miners are the first to be validated. In some cases, if you save a lot, the confirmation procedure may take several days.
3) Cryptocurrency rate jumps– also increases verification time.
Here is a video that talks about a similar case on blockchain.
How can I find out how many confirmations have passed?
I advise those who are looking for “who knows what” regarding their (and not only) transactions with bitcoins to go to blockchain.info. Here you can find any information on blocks and transactions. And also “monitor” the general situation on the market.
To find out how many confirmations have passed for a certain transaction, go to the site indicated above and enter a known hash into the search bar. After this, information about the block will be displayed.
At the bottom of the page there is a list of transactions carried out with it. Click on the one you need and get the desired value.
How to increase speed?
Methods to reduce transaction time:
- Increased commission for miners - experts advise “not to be greedy” and pay 0.0002 BTC or more for confirmation.
- The volume of transferred funds - the more cryptocurrency you transfer, the higher the status of the operation in the “crypto network”.
- Using specialized platforms like coinbase.com - on such services, buyers and sellers save their keys. Thanks to this, confirmation occurs within this platform, and not on the general network.
- Using Bitcoin wallets with the function of creating a multi-signature - on such services, to confirm a transaction with cryptocurrency, the user will only need to indicate the private key. The second “signature” is the service key. This way, money and time are not wasted on confirming the transaction.
This is the overview for beginners taking their first steps towards cryptocurrency. I hope my material will help you take these steps more confidently!
13.02.201717:21
Boris Obolikshto
expert
It's nice to feel like a myth buster, and the temptation to take such a position is always great. In order not to succumb to it, I will immediately note that the events described below happen rarely and should not serve as a refutation of the established ideas that Bitcoin is a reliable payment instrument, and a Bitcoin transaction (transfer of this digital money) is a quick and simple operation. However, for most users of Bitcoin services, a “stuck” payment will be unexpected and perhaps frightening. Therefore, I repeat: the case is atypical, but not unique. And very clearly demonstrating, on the one hand, the benefits of understanding the basics of how cryptocurrencies work (as, indeed, any technology), and on the other hand, the unpreparedness of the existing infrastructure to work with blockchain.
Stuck Bitcoin payments: how does this happen? Photo: mmgp.ru
So, our story began with the banal desire of my friend to top up his mobile phone account using a Bitcoin service, designed for this purpose (YES! Owners of phones from Ukrainian mobile operators can easily top up their account while in any Tmutarakan, if there is Internet there, and you have a non-empty Bitcoin wallet). We also told you earlier, including using a mobile application.
So, the last days of August 2016 passed, it was hot and... Well, I don’t know, let it all be due to 30+ degrees, an overheated computer and a brain melting from the heat. Still, I have not yet found any more clear reasons that clearly explain the excess.
Screenshot 1. To top up your account with bitcoins, you only need a couple of clicks
Topping up your account is simple: you go to the service’s website, enter your phone number, select the amount to top up your account and receive an address for transferring BTC from your wallet to the service provider (see screenshot 1). If the wallet is on a mobile device, then it’s even easier: a QR code will help you quickly transfer all the parameters and make a payment. Usually this is how it all happens: you point the camera at the QR code, the wallet generates a transaction and makes the payment. But that time something went wrong... No, no, reader, there is no reason to worry - everything ended well, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.
So, from the user’s point of view, everything is as usual: the wallet (it was Bitcoin Core - the most traditional one possible) formed a transaction, sent it to the network and... And nothing happened. There was no confirmation of the transfer, which usually arrives within five to fifteen minutes (less often, after half an hour or an hour). And the next day, the wallet reported a disappointing transaction status: “Status: 0/unconfirmed, in memory pool.” As the reader probably knows, transactions in Bitcoin are irrevocable, that is, there is no way to cancel them; the money transferred from the wallet has gone, but has not reached the recipient. They got stuck, and now they are not in the wallet, and the mobile account has not been replenished.
The situation of a “stuck” Bitcoin transaction is not unique; even in Russian, Google provides thousands of links for the query “stuck Bitcoin transactions” (in the search results for the query “Bitcoin Transaction Pending” there are several hundred thousand positions, an extensive discussion of stuck transactions in Russian). We’ll try to figure out what happened, but to do this we need a more detailed understanding of how transactions occur than “press a button and OK.”
I will not duplicate the story about how Bitcoin works (you can read it), we will only focus on the process of completing the transaction. Your Bitcoin application, having asked from which wallet, how much and to whom you are transferring, will generate and send to the network a request for a transaction describing everything listed in the proper format. The transaction will go to the pool (memory pool - mempool) and will wait there for the miner, who will place it in the block. When the block with this transaction enters the blockchain, the transfer is completed. As the reader remembers, the blockchain does not consist of individual transactions, but of blocks, that is, sets of transactions and data certifying them. Blocks are formed by miners, who receive two types of rewards for this: a fee for the block (currently 12.5 BTC) and a commission for transactions included in the block.
Miners compete for this fee, which is why several miners are always trying to create a block at the same time. Someone turns out to be more successful and does it earlier, receiving a reward, the rest can only hope for luck in the future. Of course, a situation is possible when several miners create their blocks almost simultaneously (the blocks are usually not the same, since miners include in them certain transactions from the pool at their discretion). The reward will go to one of the miners - the one whose block will continue the chain (that is, after it the next block will appear, etc.), the remaining block (or even a small chain of blocks), without receiving a continuation, will “die”.
But for now let’s return to the pool - the place where transactions that have not yet been confirmed or rejected “live” (more details). Miners select transactions from the pool, trying to form blocks from them. Since the block size is limited, most often only part of the transactions from the pool are selected for the block (now, when I am writing these lines, there are almost 41 thousand unconfirmed transactions in the pool, occupying more than 42 MB - it is clear that they cannot all be placed in one block) . If we trace the fate of a typical transaction, we will see the phases of its life (see screenshots 2 and 3).
Screenshot 2. The transaction appeared in the pool
Screenshot 3. The transaction was confirmed and appeared on the blockchain
Confirmation is a typical, but not the only possible fate of a transaction included in the pool. Under normal circumstances, transactions leave the pool in one of the following ways:
- When a transaction is included in a block (confirmed);
- When a transaction or one of its sources begins to conflict with another transaction that has already been confirmed (the source’s money was spent before the transaction’s turn came);
- When a transaction has the lowest priority in the pool, the pool has reached its maximum allowed size and a transaction with a higher priority is added to it (preemption);
- When a transaction dies due to a timeout (by default after 72 hours);
- When a transaction is replaced (this is a relatively new feature, we will discuss it later).
Our transaction was unlucky: either the hand trembled when sending the payment, or some other unforeseen thing happened, but the transaction that went into the pool ended up with a zero commission (fee). Some clarification is needed here. Formally, the Bitcoin network protocol does not require a commission. When Bitcoin first appeared, free transactions were possible (alas, not everyone follows the changes, and you can still sometimes hear from neophytes that Bitcoin transfers are free).
As the technology became popular and the pace of transactions increased, there were several reasons for the introduction of transaction fees. Firstly, to get rid of spam - meaningless transactions generated by attackers attacking community resources, or errors by inept developers. Secondly, the need to rank transactions to enable users to speed up the processing of their payments. Transactions with zero commission have little chance of getting into a block and becoming confirmed in our time when there are more than enough requests for transactions. Therefore, the fate of our transaction had to be unenviable: die due to a timeout or be forced out of the pool.
Depending on which wallet you use, the usual fate of a “killed” transaction may be different. For example, the transaction may be declared failed, and the unsent funds will reappear in the wallet. But it is also possible for the wallet to try again to send the transaction to the pool for execution. In this case, the transaction will be “reborn” in the pool and will hang there, periodically resuming, indefinitely. In the latter case, your funds are frozen: they are inaccessible to you and the recipient. This is the case most often described by users who are faced with frozen transactions (see, for example, the note on experiments with zero commission). At first glance, this is precisely the situation that my friend encountered - the wallet stubbornly reports the same thing: “Status: 0/unconfirmed, in memory pool.”
In the described cases (see, in particular, the links above), the frozen funds can be returned to the wallet using special reload keys or by reloading the program from scratch (in the latter case, the blockchain is loaded again by requests to the network, that is, transactions that were not included in it will be ignored, and the funds will be returned to the wallet). The complete reboot procedure is troublesome and can take a lot of time (it’s no joke to reload more than 100 GB of blockchain data), however, my friend did it. And I didn’t see anything good. Even after a couple of months, the popular blockchain analysis service blockchain.info reported: “Transaction rejected by our node. Reason: Fee is too low / Not sufficient priority." That is, he still saw the transaction, but refused to execute it. It's a sad situation.
But we're lucky! On January 21, it came to our transaction, and it (hurray!!!) was completed. And the transaction description shows what was unusual. Let's look at screenshot 4.
Screenshot 4. “Our” transaction is confirmed!
In addition to the zero commission (Fees), the transaction also differs from that shown in the third screenshot in the “Lock Time” field. This transaction parameter indicates from which block miners can include a transaction in a block. Many wallets set it to 0, allowing it to be turned on immediately. And the Bitcoin Core wallet, which by right of its founder considers itself obligated to monitor the security of the entire Bitcoin network, sets the value of the nearest generated block, which prevents an attacker from attacking the network by building a branch from later transactions that competes with existing blocks. But block 427560 turned out to be just the rare block that got the competitor. Two miners almost simultaneously, with a difference of less than two seconds, generated blocks with this number (it would be more correct to say “of this height” - the serial number of a block in the blockchain is called height).
Blocks that generated branch points are displayed, for example, by Blockchain.info
This is probably a rare combination: binding to a forked block and zero commission created a situation due to which our transaction was stuck in the pool for a long time. Fortunately, everything ended well: the transaction was completed and the mobile account was topped up. Nevertheless, what happened, in my opinion, is a good reason to talk about how promising payments in Bitcoin are.
On the one hand, as interest in the technology and the number of active wallets grows, the number of requests for transactions increases, and hence the competition for confirmation of transactions (that is, making payments). On the other hand, the situation is improving because new wallets support a dynamic commission setting depending on the fullness of the pool. And the developers are introducing new features, in particular, the ability to increase the commission for a transaction that has already been sent to the pool, but is still not confirmed (the Opt-In Replace-by-fee (RBF) function). Naturally, new features do not appear immediately and not in all wallets, which forces users to monitor the situation, perhaps more closely than they would like. We can recommend, in particular, the translation of a relatively recent note “What to do if a transaction on the Bitcoin network is stuck?”
Customer support could be another factor stimulating the spread of Bitcoin payments. But for now, the salvation of drowning people is the work of the hands... Not only of the drowning people themselves, but also of enthusiasts who tell us on the forums what to do. However, I would like to see permanent services/hotlines, at least at the level of announcements on poles: “I’ll set up Bitcoin payments, help return stuck transactions.” Clearly, there is a problem here: while there are few payments, the service cannot be profitable; while there is no service, it is difficult to count on an explosive growth in the number of payments (by the way, growth should also create add-on services that allow clearing payments between service participants, reducing the load on the blockchain).
Another question concerns not technology, but law. Since a transaction can take quite a long time, and the volatility of Bitcoin is considerable, then rules are needed, since the usual “three banking days” no longer correspond to our ideas of fairness. In the example in which we looked at a frozen payment, the funds were credited at the rate at the time the transaction was created. But since the transaction, the Bitcoin rate has increased by one and a half times! Ok, my friend, who had been waiting for a translation, was happy about this too. But such risks are hardly acceptable for mass payments. It’s hard to imagine the opposite situation, when a transaction that arrived on the third day lost a noticeable part of its value. Perhaps the situation could be improved by insuring Bitcoin payments? But I have never heard of such services.
In other words: technological readiness for the implementation of cryptocurrencies today is much higher than infrastructural readiness. Everyone who is involved in the process of developing cryptocurrencies can partly contribute to improving the situation. In the meantime, all enthusiasts are required to remain vigilant and not lose sight of the changes taking place.
The Bitcoin network is the largest and most resilient distributed computer network in the world. This is evidenced by the system's computing power, which recently exceeded 1 zettalop (one million petaflops), which is eight times the total power of all supercomputers in the world.
Despite this impressive computing performance, Bitcoin was recently removed from the list of distributed computing projects. Formally reasons The problem is that the power of the network cannot be adequately assessed after the advent of special Bitcoin ASICs that do not perform floating point operations.
However, it is possible to calculate how other supercomputers or network projects are potentially efficient at mining Bitcoin (supercomputers, for example, have the ability to perform integer operations used in hashing).
So, the fastest supercomputer today, the Chinese Tianhe-2, has a performance rating of 33.86 petaflops/sec, which is approximately 0.001% of the power of the Bitcoin network.
Network status monitoring
As Bitcoin improves and develops, increasingly competing with various retail payment systems such as Visa and MasterCard, as well as global payment services like Swift, the smooth functioning of a decentralized network becomes the first necessary condition for its viability.
The "Official Bitcoin Site" Bitcoin.org has done a great job compiling archives of all the warnings and network outages.
The final report provides insight into all critical observations of the performance and health of the Bitcoin distributed network, including availability, extensibility, security and transaction speed indicators over different time intervals.
What other metrics might be useful if we were to assess the health and strength of the Bitcoin network? We have collected together 12 of the most significant indicators.
The Bitnodes project can help determine the size of the underlying Bitcoin network, as it discovers all the running "full nodes" of the network. The search is carried out using the following method: message getaddr sent recursively to establish communication with all available nodes in the list, starting with the initial ones. The system performs this roll call every 24 hours and displays the results on a world map, along with ratings and information about the Bitcoin client version.
The Bitnodes project was launched in April 2013 with the support of the Bitcoin Foundation as a media sponsor. The latest report on available nodes on the Bitcoin network can be seen.
Data replication
Exchange of information on the Bitcoin network does not happen instantly. But how quickly does information about Bitcoin transactions spread? The data replication scale created by BitcoinStats shows how quickly a transaction reaches 50 percent of all participants in the peer-to-peer network (i.e., how much time passed between the time a transaction or block hit the network and the moment when the majority of network nodes received this update). Now this figure fluctuates around 3.9-6 seconds.
Lists of starting servers
Imagine that you are launching a Bitcoin client for the first time. How do you know who to connect with? Lists of known network nodes (starter servers) are used by all Bitcoin clients to determine the worker nodes on the network that the client will connect to when starting up. Lists of known nodes are maintained and distributed by volunteers using a variety of methods so that nodes joining the network for the first time have a clear understanding of the peers currently running on the network.
The lists provide information only about the nodes that are online and available. Metric of their availability, also p developed by BitcoinStats, reflects the results of attempts to connect to nodes contained in various bootstrap lists. It shows how easy it is for a new node to connect to the network who has never done so before. The closer to 100%, the greater the chance that it will work the first time.
An additional scale shows the speed of the system's response to providing lists of available nodes, measured in milliseconds (the time elapsed from the moment the request was sent until the response was received).
This series of graphs, designed by developer Peter Vuillet, displays "hash difficulty" by showing the number of terahashes per second the network generates over various time intervals (1 terahash equals 1,000 gigahashes).
Hash difficulty reflects how difficult it is to find a new block compared to the original difficulty at which the genesis block was released (initial difficulty is set to one). The difficulty score is automatically revised every 2,016 blocks (roughly every 2 weeks) and right now it is 35 billion times higher than the difficulty Satoshi originally mined at.
This pie chart from Organ Ofcorti evaluates the distribution of hash activity among the largest mining pools over a weekly time frame. This metric is important because the integrity of the network depends on a single source of mining power not constantly controlling more than 50% of the hashing activity.
The table of found hashes shows all the statistical indicators that can be extracted from the number of blocks found by a user in one week. The authorship of blocks, as a rule, is interpreted according to the version of the original source, for example, according to a message on the website of a specific mining pool that announced the discovery, sometimes according to indirect data, such as signatures on Coinbase or known public keys.
Data collected from indirect sources may turn out to be unreliable and may not take into account individual blocks, the completion of which miners chose to keep secret, which will undoubtedly affect the statistical indicators of the level of hashing activity.
The Bitcoin protocol is designed to ensure that miners follow the rules inherent in the program concept: as soon as a new block is discovered, all participants in the network should be notified about it.
Ego miners do not follow this rule: when they find a block, they keep this fact secret and begin searching for a new one... When there are several blocks in the chain, they reveal their cards, revealing blocks that others thought were still wanted .
The less believable the timing of the top miners before block completion is, the more likely it is that they are using a self-mining strategy. Currently, the metric suggests that there is a 94% chance that ego mining will not occur.
Coinometrics explains the principles of its metric:
“The only way to determine the probability of using a given strategy is to measure the time intervals between the discovery of new blocks and relate it to the average expected rate. The rate at which new blocks are discovered is determined by how quickly the miner finds the hash given the complex protocol inputs. Each attempt to determine a hash has a certain probability of successful resolution. By definition, the degree of probability does not depend on a specific block. As a result, the rate at which new blocks are generated should follow an exponential progression.
Stuck blocks are valid blocks that are not part of the main blockchain. They can occur naturally, such as if two miners completed the same block at the same time, or they can arise as a result of a hacker attack if an attacker with hashing knowledge tries to reverse transactions.
The blockchain maintains a constantly updated list of transactions that can’t wait to be included in a new block. The control system displays the total number of unconfirmed transactions, including the number of bitcoins and the volume of these transactions, measured in kilobytes.
This graph shows the average time in minutes it takes for a transaction to be included in a block. The timing may fluctuate within reasonable limits depending on the time it takes to validate the transaction, and the degree of risk depends on the Bitcoin value of the transaction.
11. Total blockchain volume
The total size of the blockchain is important because for the network to operate efficiently, it is important that the amount of disk space for storing information does not exceed reasonable limits. And, in addition, the size of the blockchain affects the synchronization speed after installing a new version of the Bitcoin client. This measurement method helps determine the true size of the blockchain, including headers and transactions, but excluding the index database.
12. Standard block size
