According to Antoine Le Calvez, chief data engineer at CoinMetrics, it took 122 minutes to mine block 679.786, as stated on Twitter. This block was mined by the F2Pool mining team.
According to the bitcoin code, a block is mined every ten minutes, so what happened had a probability of 1 in a 200.000.
This was the longest time between the creation of two blocks since October 2011, when it took 144 minutes to extract the 149.097 block.
In recent days, due to problems observed at the bitcoin mining plant in China’s Xinjiang province after the total blackout of the electricity distribution network on April 15th, the mining time has slowed down. The power outage caused the total hashrate power of the bitcoin network to drop by 45%.
As we said, in the bitcoin blockchain a block is created every 10 minutes. Of course, there are anomalies in this regularity. Block 0, the so-called “genesis block” mined by Satohi Nakamoto on January 3, 2009 and block 1, hold the record for the longest time between them, as it took 5 days, 8 hours and 39 minutes.
Two more blocks followed on May 22, 2009 and June 5, 2009 which took a day and an hour to be mined.
